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Lawyers for Leon Black, the billionaire investor who has been accused in a civil lawsuit of raping a teenage girl inside Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2002, reached out to a powerful federal judge in 2024 to raise doubts about the alleged victim’s claims, a Guardian investigation has found.

The move set off a months-long court proceeding, which was conducted outside public view and led the US district judge Jed Rakoff to reverse a $2.5m award that had been granted to the alleged victim in a separate Epstein-related class action lawsuit, according to court records. She was later given a much smaller settlement in the class action case.

Jane Doe, as she is known in court filings, has claimed she was trafficked by Epstein and raped by Black when she was a teenager more than two decades ago.

The Guardian’s investigation is revealing new details about the private communications in Black’s legal campaign, which undermined Doe in her civil lawsuit against the Wall Street billionaire.

In a recent court order, Doe faced a significant setback when Jessica Clarke – the federal judge presiding over her civil lawsuit against Black – sanctioned Doe and her former lawyer for “serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case”. Judge Clarke said Doe’s former lawyer had “repeatedly lied to the court and opposing counsel”, and directed her client to destroy a social media account. Doe was sanctioned for having “falsified” some sonogram images that appeared in personal journals, which were submitted to the court as evidence of her abuse by Epstein.

However, it was not a complete victory for Black, as the judge also ruled that the high-stakes lawsuit could proceed.

Black, the 74-year-old former Apollo Global Management CEO, paid Epstein $170m, according to an investigation by the Senate finance committee, which he says was for tax and estate planning. Black has denied allegations that he raped or ever met Doe, who is now 40 years old. He has never been charged with any crimes in connection to Epstein or otherwise.

The Epstein scandal has prompted questions about why the accused sex trafficker’s elite circle of friends and associates has not faced greater scrutiny. That may change. Black is due to testify before the House oversight committee on 26 June, according to a person familiar with the matter, as part of the committee’s investigation into, among other things, Epstein’s sex-trafficking rings. He is also facing questions from the Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who claimed in a recent letter to Black that the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice “remove any lingering doubt” as to whether Black was “connected to women in Epstein’s network” and alleged that “powerful associates in the US and abroad were surveilling and paying off women on [Black’s] behalf”.

Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich, called Wyden’s assertions “outrageous and false” in an emailed statement, and characterized the senator’s comments as a “politically motivated attack”.

The Guardian’s investigation, based on access to extensive court records, many of which are still under seal but are due to be unsealed soon, reveals how Black and his legal team’s private pleas to a federal judge led to a legal battle involving extensive written submissions and multiple hearings in a case in which he was not a party.

It included an extraordinary personal appeal from Black to Judge Rakoff, a well-known and respected jurist based in the southern district of New York. The written message, which was obtained by the Guardian, portrayed Black as a victim, invoking the death of Black’s father, disputing Doe’s credibility and citing the damage the allegations have done to Black’s reputation. It was submitted by the billionaire’s lawyers days before Rakoff denied the $2.5m award that Doe was due to receive in the Epstein-related class action lawsuit.

In another twist, Black’s legal effort was bolstered by a high-profile lawyer who is publicly heralded as an advocate for Epstein’s victims.

All these communications occurred outside public view.

In an exclusive statement to the Guardian in which Doe described her feelings about what has transpired, she said: “We are often taught that the justice system is there to protect victims and correct wrongs. My experience has shown me that it is far more complicated than that.
Justice is not always blind. It is often shaped by power, access, and who is able to withstand the process.
I am still here. And I am not done.”

Jane Doe takes Leon Black to court

In July 2023, Jane Doe alleged in a legal complaint filed against Leon Black in the southern district of New York that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Black at Epstein’s townhouse in late spring of 2002. She was 16 years old.

Black, who is worth an estimated $14bn, was the chair and chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm he co-founded and led until he stepped down in March 2021, in the wake of revelations he had paid tens of millions of dollars to Epstein. Black has said the payments were for legitimate financial advice and that he was “completely unaware” of misconduct by Epstein, who in emails released earlier this year by the Department of Justice sometimes referred to Black as “Mr Big”.

Apollo announced in January 2021 that an internal review by the Dechert LLP law firm, which Apollo’s board commissioned to investigate Black’s “previous professional relationship” with Epstein, found Black’s payments to Epstein were for “bona fide” financial services. The report found there was “no evidence” that Black was involved in Epstein’s criminal activities. That review has since faced scrutiny, however, including by Senator Wyden, who claimed his staff uncovered evidence that money paid by Black to Epstein “was used to finance Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations”. Black’s lawyer called Wyden’s “attack” on the Dechert report “completely baseless”.

In her legal complaint, Doe alleged that Epstein told her that Black was his “special friend” and that because she was Epstein’s “special girl”, he had chosen her to give Black the same kind of “massage treatment” that she gave to him. Doe understood, according to her legal complaint, this meant that she was expected to strip naked and have sex. But when Doe and Black went up to a third-floor massage room, she alleged in her complaint, Black threw her down on the massage table and then abused her vaginally and anally with sex toys. He then bit her vagina, she alleged, causing bleeding and extreme pain. Reflexively, the complaint says, Doe kicked him. In response, the complaint alleges, he became enraged, then raped her.

Doe alleged in her complaint that the internal abrasions she suffered from the alleged attack that day continued to cause her pain more than 20 years later. The complaint describes Doe as having autism. While she has an above-average IQ, the complaint alleges, her neurodivergence makes her “extremely trusting”.

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Illustration: Guardian Design/Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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On the campaign trail in Florida farm country, a long-shot Republican candidate for governor is selling $40 T-shirts that say “No American should die for Israel.”

A few hours west, Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, is preparing a pitch to donors to help fund a new outlet: a weekly newsletter taking on the right-wing podcasters critical of Israel.

Rarely is foreign policy a major political issue in a midterm election year. But the war in Iran has helped turn the U.S. relationship with Israel into a marquee topic among Republicans, pushing allies of President Trump like Ms. Loomer to escalate their attacks on conservative critics of the relationship and creating new fault lines on America’s far right.

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Ms. Loomer said in an interview last week, referring to the turn against Israel among some conservatives. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

Ms. Loomer, who gained prominence last year after pushing Mr. Trump to fire White House officials she deemed disloyal, is emerging as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. Her attacks on what used to be her fellow allies of Mr. Trump are evidence of the urgency that some in the president’s camp — and supporters of a close relationship with Israel — see in seeking to blunt the influence of right-wing critics of the Jewish state.

On her X account with nearly two million followers, Ms. Loomer refers to Israel as “our greatest ally” and discloses purported personal details about prominent critics of Israel and Mr. Trump.

Ms. Loomer said she has been honing her pitch to donors as she has prepared to roll out her newsletter, The Loomer Rumor, which she said was meant to showcase her “opposition research” while targeting right-wing figures critical of Israel — a group that she calls the “Woke Reich.” Its best-known voice is Tucker Carlson, who has broken with Mr. Trump over the war in Iran. Mr. Carlson has accused Israel of pushing Mr. Trump into war, which he says makes the president a “slave” to foreign interests.

The war has added to a tectonic shift in public opinion on American foreign policy that began with the Gaza war — a bipartisan swing away from Israel. It is a change that has already divided Democrats and is now penetrating a Republican Party whose leaders, buoyed by Evangelical voters, long positioned it as pro-Israel. And it is palpable even in Florida, where Ms. Loomer lives, and support for Israel runs so deep that the legislature last year lifted credit-rating limits to allow local governments to buy more Israeli bonds.

“It’s been very shocking,” said Chase Tramont, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives. “You have so many younger folks on the right that are actually singing the same tune that the radical left is singing.”

Mr. Tramont, a pastor, described U.S. support for Israel as “grounded in historical precedent, biblical values and America First policies.” He introduced a bill last year to require Florida schools and state agencies to refer to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the region that are widely used in Israel.

But staunchly pro-Israel politicians like Mr. Tramont, 46, are starting to seem like a minority among younger Republicans. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that 57 percent of Republicans under 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 50 percent last year and 35 percent in 2022, and about the same share as Americans overall. Among Republicans 50 and older, 75 percent still support Israel, a figure that has barely budged since 2022.

The result is a contrast between the Trump administration’s Israel-aligned foreign policy and the trajectory of public opinion on the right. The five-week bombing of Iran this year was the first time the United States and Israel launched and fought a war side by side. And yet in the podcast “manosphere” that widely endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024, the loudest voices are critics of Israel like Mr. Carlson.

“The great irony in this is that you have the U.S. and Israel jointly conducting a war,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and a longtime proponent of a close relationship with Israel. “The thing that’s bizarre here is that the administration is not actually setting the tone in some ways.”

Mr. Cohen is among those who see the shift against Israel as driven, in part, by ingrained antisemitism. “There always was an anti-Israel and also antisemitic part of the Republican Party,” he said.

Mr. Carlson said on his show last week that for American politicians, “love for Israel is accompanied by contempt for the United States, maybe even hatred for the United States.” He rejects accusations of antisemitism, arguing that his critique of Israel is driven by his view of U.S. interests. In Florida, he has praised James Fishback, 31, as a Republican contender in the state governor’s race.

At a campaign stop last Wednesday in the small farming town of Monticello, outside Tallahassee, Mr. Fishback railed against gun laws and foreign workers. He said Americans should accept “several mass shootings a year” as the cost of their gun rights, and called the H-1B skilled worker visa program a “scam” that he would seek to end.

But the T-shirt he hawked at a coffee shop was the one saying that no American should die for Israel. Sean Lozano, the deputy campaign manager, said it was their best seller.

“It does very well with the younger crowd,” he said.

Mr. Fishback is in the single digits in primary polls and has faced accusations, which he denies, from a former fiancée who has said their relationship began while she was still a minor. But his ability to generate buzz among young people has shown how Israel has the potential to emerge as a campaign issue, especially amid evidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel helped pull Mr. Trump into the unpopular war on Iran.

In Monticello, Mr. Fishback drew applause when he promised to pardon a Florida International University student arrested after what her supporters said was a joke about Mr. Netanyahu bombing a university event. Answering a question about traffic cameras, Mr. Fishback ended with warning of a future in which government surveillance “has flagged you for making an antisemitic remark in the park.” He said Florida should divest from its Israeli bonds because taxpayer money should not “be sent to any foreign country.”

“That’s not antisemitism,” Mr. Fishback said. “That is just calling it as it is.”

Several older people in the audience, who all declined to give their full names, said they were put off by Mr. Fishback’s fixation on Israel. One 70-year-old woman, who described herself as a born-again Christian, said that she loved Mr. Netanyahu and that the United States needed to walk hand in hand with Israel.

But many of the younger attendees, mostly men, said they had come to see Mr. Fishback because of his views on Israel and his opposition to the Iran war. A university student, Garrett Wilson, 20, said he broke with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and referred to the false conspiracy theories that Israel may have had something to do with his death. (Mr. Fishback said those accusations were “unsubstantiated by the evidence.”)

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Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. Credit…Annie Flanagan for The New York Times

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After winning a Breakthrough Prize, the world’s most lucrative science award, theoretical physicist David Gross is using the moment to warn of nuclear war’s existential threat—and how we can escape it

David Gross, a celebrated U.S. theoretical physicist, calls himself an optimist—especially concerning the future of his field. He’s certain that somewhere out there lurks a final, unified theory of nature, just waiting to be discovered. But he’s pessimistic about our chances of actually discovering it; on balance, he estimates, it’s more likely that we’ll destroy ourselves in nuclear warfare first. And as the latest recipient of a $3-million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, he’s using the opportunity to warn the world of this dire peril.

When Gross speaks, especially about prospects of a unified theory, people tend to listen—after all, he’s responsible for some of the biggest steps we’ve taken toward devising one.

Such a theory would, by definition, unify three known fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—with a fourth, gravity, reconciling a long-standing schism between these domains. In the early 1970s, Gross co-discovered a phenomenon called asymptotic freedom—a counterintuitive property of the strong nuclear force showing that interactions between quarks (the subatomic constituents of neutrons and protons) weaken at shorter distances and strengthen at longer ones. In other words, the farther apart you try to pull quarks, the harder they’ll resist. But if you pile them together inside a proton, they will frolic freely, almost as if they have no resistance at all.

The idea has been exhaustively confirmed in high-energy experiments, and it helped establish a theory of the strong force called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which became a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics. It also netted Gross a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the aftermath of QCD’s ascendance, his quest for unification turned more speculative as he formulated foundational aspects of string theory, specifically a mathematically elegant hybrid type he co-developed in the 1980s called heterotic string theory, which mixes other types to describe fundamental particles. Unlike asymptotic freedom, however, heterotic string theory (and string theory in general) has yet to be validated by experiments.

Although the connection between these technical contributions and the existential threat of nuclear warfare may seem tenuous, Gross maintains it’s quite clear: Centuries of further theoretical and experimental progress may be required to find and verify a final theory—but planning for such a future is shortsighted when global nuclear war could effectively end human civilization itself in a single afternoon. Reducing that risk, he says, is therefore at least as important for discovering a unified theory as performing the fundamental physics work itself.

In a conversation with Scientific American, Gross discussed his Breakthrough Prize, the reasons for slow progress toward a unified theory and the folly of ballistic missile defense. And he explained why the current status quo means everyone now on Earth still faces the threat of nuclear annihilation.

You’ve won several major awards during your long career—the Dirac Medal in 1988, the Harvey Prize in 2000, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. Now you’ve won this year’s $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as well. Do you consider this the capstone?

Nothing really compares to the Nobel Prize, but this one is certainly the most lucrative. I’ve been heavily involved in raising money for my institute, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and for many others like it around the world. So with this Breakthrough Prize, it’s nice to finally have some money to give to other people!

You know, this is a “lifetime achievement” prize, which carries the suggestion that my lifetime is drawing to a close. So that’s a bit of a bummer. But I’m still extremely honored and pleased by it—the way these Breakthrough Prizes work is that the selections are informed by the opinions of previous recipients, and in this case, those are some of the people I respect most in my field. And this prize is more flexible and open-ended than most others; it can go to people whose work is still somewhat speculative and is as yet unconfirmed by nature.

You seem to hit both sides here, in that some of your work—asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics, for example—has been well validated by experimentation, whereas other aspects, such as heterotic string theory, remain quite speculative. Is that a fair assessment?

Well, I’ve had a long life so far! I’ve seen extreme swings in fundamental physics. When I was beginning, it was during a period of experimental supremacy, with enormous discoveries being made all the time—and on the theoretical side, almost nothing was understood. That was an exciting period for a theorist. And now it’s sort of the opposite. There are a lot of great theoretical ideas and progress, but nature hasn’t been so kind with its discovery. And living through both periods—and everything in between—has, of course, shaped my work.

It used to be that the data were all there, and one tried to make predictions based on flimsy ideas. Now, new data aren’t coming, but the theory is so much more understood. So the goal now is to advance the theory and hopefully to make contact with experiment, but that’s getting harder all the time. In the past, you could make a prediction or try to calculate something and have it tested experimentally within a year! Now it’s “look, we’re planning the future of the field on a 30-to-60-year time scale.”

What’s caused that slowdown? Just things getting more expensive?

Not exactly. The projects themselves have gotten bigger, which makes them take longer. But they haven’t really become more expensive: given inflation, technological growth, and our increased understanding of the physics, we can build better machines with less money now.

What’s changed has to do with the scales of distance or energy that we’re exploring, rather than the scale of time that we usually think about when discussing our progress into the future. From the point of view of physics, the most important scale is the size, or the distance, that we can probe, with smaller distances requiring greater energies to reach.

So in the 20th century, we went from molecular to atomic to nuclear physics, to where we were studying the structure of the atomic nucleus. Across the past two centuries, we’ve progressed by roughly 15 or 20 orders of magnitude. And this enormous progress gave us a very complete “standard” theory of particle physics.

But the next scale that is suggested by experimental observation and theoretical extrapolation is many orders of magnitude removed from the current scale that we can easily explore. We seem to have another 20 orders of magnitude to go! And it gets worse: One of the major implications of asymptotic freedom in QCD and other quantum field theories is that the physics changes very slowly as we go to shorter and shorter distances. Specifically, it changes logarithmically.

Let’s compare that with another scale, which is the amount of money it takes to reach those higher and higher energies to go to those shorter and shorter distances. For this, the cost scales at least as the energy squared, if not even more. So the physics potential is increasing only logarithmically, while the cost is increasing like the energy squared—there’s an exponential difference between them. And that’s just a fact of life we’ll have to deal with if we want to understand nature at these small scales.

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Almost 150 people, including 17 Americans, are stranded on a cruise ship off the coast of West Africa, after a suspected hantavirus outbreak on the vessel killed at least three people and left several others ill.

The MV Hondius, operated by tour company Oceanwide Expeditions, left Ushuaia, Argentina, last month on a journey through remote parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, several passengers became sick with a rapidly progressing respiratory illness, the company said.

Seven cases of the rare rodent-borne hantavirus have been identified so far, including two confirmed cases and five suspected cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.

The vessel with 149 people on board is currently anchored off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, an archipelago nation off the west coast of Africa, after being refused entry to the port.

There is no plan yet for disembarking the remaining crew and passengers, with Oceanwide Expeditions saying they are considering sailing on to Spain’s Canary Islands.

Hantavirus can cause a severe and often deadly respiratory illness called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which killed Betsy Arakawa, the wife of the late actor Gene Hackman, last year.

Humans most commonly become infected through contact with rodents such as rats and mice, especially with their urine, droppings, and saliva, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Just one type of hantavirus, the Andes virus, is known to be able to transmit from person to person, but it is rare. It is primarily found in Chile and Argentina, where the ship originated.

Still, health authorities emphasized that the outbreak does not represent a public health threat. “There is no need for panic or travel restrictions,” said Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe.

Here’s what we know about the outbreak on the ship.

Where had the ship been?

The MV Hondius first left Ushuaia in Argentina over a month ago. According to the MarineTraffic ship-tracking site, the Dutch-flagged passenger cruise ship made stops in Antarctica before returning to Ushuaia for a night and leaving again on April 1. It then stopped at the British overseas territory of Saint Helena before anchoring Sunday off Praia, MarineTraffic said.

Along the way, passengers visited some of the world’s most remote islands, where they would have seen much wildlife, including whales, dolphins, penguins, and seabirds, according to the trip’s itinerary.

When it reached Praia, the vessel was not authorized to dock at the port, with Cape Verde’s Health Ministry citing a need to protect the country’s public health. Authorities there sent staff to visit the ship and assess the situation.

What do we know about the victims?

The first suspected case was a 70-year-old Dutchman, who suddenly fell ill on the ship with a fever, headache, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, South Africa’s Health Department told CNN. He died on board on April 11 after going into respiratory distress, WHO said.

The man’s wife, who was 69 years old and also Dutch, was taken to South Africa but collapsed at an airport while trying to fly home to the Netherlands and died at a nearby hospital on April 26. She tested positive for a variant of hantavirus, Oceanwide Expeditions confirmed Monday.

“The beautiful journey they experienced together was abruptly and permanently cut short,” the couple’s family said in a statement sent to CNN by Dutch charity Namens de Familie, which supports people receiving media attention after personal tragedy.

“We are still unable to comprehend that we have lost them. We wish to bring them home and commemorate them in peace and privacy,” they said.

After the ship left Saint Helena, a British national onboard fell sick on April 27. He is now in a critical condition at private medical facility in Johannesburg, the company said. He is the second confirmed hantavirus case.

CNN has reached out to the British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office.

On May 2, a German national died on board the MV Hondius. While her cause of death has not yet been established, it is being treated as a suspected case.

And two crew members — one British and one Dutch national — are currently experiencing acute respiratory symptoms, requiring urgent care, Oceanwide Expeditions said. Hantavirus has not been confirmed in either case.

What happens next?

Dutch authorities are actively preparing to evacuate the two symptomatic crew members and an individual associated with the passenger that passed away on May 2, the tour operator said.

The evacuation will involve two specialized aircraft equipped with medical equipment and staffed by trained medical crews. It’s not yet clear when this will take place.

“Sailing on to Las Palmas or Tenerife is being considered, where further medical screening and handling could take place, organized and supervised by the WHO and Dutch health services,” the company said, confirming that passengers will not disembark in Cape Verde.

Strict health and safety procedures are currently in place on the ship, including isolation measures, hygiene protocols, and medical monitoring. The company said the atmosphere “remains calm” and that passengers were “generally composed.”

One passenger, travel vlogger Jake Rosmarin, spoke of the fear and uncertainty percolating through the ship on Monday.

“What’s happening right now is very real for all of us here. We’re not just a story. We’re not just headlines,” he said in a video posted on Instagram, his voice cracking with emotion.

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Seven cases of the rare rodent-borne hantavirus have been identified

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One of this year’s top Senate contests is something of a bizarro-world race.

The Republican candidate, despite being the incumbent, is little known and still trying to introduce himself to voters. He used his first ad to talk about starting his life in a foster home.

The Democratic candidate, despite being out of office, is a household name after spending half a century in politics. His first ad was very different — a scathing attack aiming to define his rival by tying him to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.

This is the upside-down picture in Ohio, where Senator Jon Husted, a Republican appointed last year to replace Vice President JD Vance, is hoping to fend off former Senator Sherrod Brown, a three-term Democrat who was unseated in 2024.

The race is central to determining which party controls the Senate in 2027. Democrats need to flip at least four Republican-held seats in November, and Ohio is widely seen as one of the most competitive contests.

The election is a test of how far even a Republican-dominated state has swung left during President Trump’s second term and of whether Mr. Brown, as he has done in the past, can outperform his party in a state where Democrats have been trounced in the last three presidential elections.

Now, as the general election begins — Mr. Brown faces only token opposition in the primary contest on Tuesday and Mr. Husted is unopposed — both sides are beginning an advertising war expected to exceed the $550 million spent on Ohio’s 2024 Senate race. The winner will serve the final two years of Mr. Vance’s term and then face re-election again in 2028.

Mr. Brown’s opening salvo last week sought to capitalize on Mr. Husted’s relatively low profile by highlighting $116,000 in campaign contributions he received in the past from Leslie Wexner, an Ohio billionaire who was the source of much of Mr. Epstein’s wealth. The ad was an attempt to both depress Republican turnout and hammer Mr. Husted as tied to corruption in Washington and Columbus, Ohio’s capital.

“Of all 535 members of Congress, who’s taken the most money from associates of Jeffrey Epstein?” the narrator asks in Mr. Brown’s first TV ad, which began airing on Friday. “Jon Husted, that’s who.”

Mr. Husted’s campaign manager, Drew Thompson, argued that Mr. Brown had Epstein ties, too, pointing to his past acceptance of campaign donations from Mr. Wexner’s wife — $12,700 in increments between 2011 and 2017.

“Who knows what that paid for?” Mr. Thompson said. “That’s why Ohioans voted him out after 32 years in Washington.”

National party leaders are watching the Ohio race closely.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, spent months urging Mr. Brown, 73, to attempt a comeback. Part of Mr. Schumer’s appeal to Mr. Brown was that he was the only Ohio Democrat who could win in an increasingly red state.

Mr. Trump carried Ohio by 11 percentage points in 2024 as Mr. Brown lost by three points, a gap that has encouraged Democrats to think that a better political environment will help the famously rumpled senator return to Washington.

The Ohio Senate race is expected to be one of the nation’s most expensive contests.

The main super PAC for Senate Republicans, the Senate Leadership Fund, has already earmarked at least $79 million for television and digital advertising, mail, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Its Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, will reserve about $40 million just on television advertising, according to a spokeswoman, Lauren French.

“Sherrod is doing it because he knows he’s probably the only one who can prevail,” said Aaron Pickrell, a Columbus-based Democratic strategist who ran the Ohio re-election campaign for President Barack Obama in 2012, the last time the state was truly a presidential battleground. “A lot of people don’t think we can win. To have Sherrod run ensures that there’s a level of resources commitment.”

Though he has been in office since the turn of the millennium, Mr. Husted has rarely been in a hard-fought general election.

He served for years in the State House representing a Republican-leaning district near Dayton, where he attended college and was a cornerback on a national championship football team. He became speaker of the Ohio House and briefly served in the State Senate before coasting to victory in statewide campaigns for secretary of state. Then he became the running mate and lieutenant governor to Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed him to replace Mr. Vance last year.

Now Mr. Husted is a sitting senator who lacks the usual advantages of incumbency in a year when an unpopular Mr. Trump is forecast to be a drag on all Republicans. He has long presented himself as a business-friendly Republican in the style of Mr. DeWine and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, though since entering the Senate, he has adopted a more Trump-friendly demeanor.

Mr. Brown, on the other hand, is a challenger with 50 years in elected office at a time when Democrats across the country are looking for fresh faces.

“The only challenge for Sherrod is that he’s an older guy,” said Nan Whaley, a former mayor of Dayton, Ohio, who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2022. But she added, “In Ohio, that’s handy. Our voters are older here in Ohio.”

Ohio Republicans expect to paint Mr. Brown, long an economic populist, as a left-winger out of touch with normal Americans.

“This is not J.F.K.’s Democrat Party,” said former Representative Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, a Republican who spent a dozen years in Congress. “It’s pretty far left.”

If Mr. Husted is known for anything in Ohio, it is for being placed in the awkward position of having to testify for the defense in a major corruption trial involving top energy executives in the state. Mr. Husted already testified once in a related case that resulted in a mistrial. He is expected to be called to testify again in October — timing that Ohio Democrats hope will lead to a pre-election news cycle that will lift Mr. Brown’s chances in November.

Available polling suggests that the race is either a dead heat or that Mr. Husted is narrowly ahead, but even in conservative Ohio, the political environment is shifting against Republicans.

“I tell everybody I think every Republican is going to have a tough time because you’re running into a headwind,” said former Representative Jim Renacci, an Ohio Republican who lost a Senate race to Mr. Brown in 2018. “It’s almost a match of where I was in 2018.”

More on the 2026 Midterm Elections

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• Close Midterm Races: Democratic officials have added eight candidates to a list of top contenders in congressional midterm battlegrounds, wading into a handful of contested primaries to make clear the party leadership’s preference.

• U.S. Senate Race in Texas: Many of the wealthy donors who have bankrolled Ken Paxton, the firebrand Texas attorney general, have decided to watch the race from the sidelines, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

• Did Harris Pick the Wrong Race?: Some Democrats wish Kamala Harris had decided to run for governor in California, where Democrats are struggling to break through, rather than weigh another White House run.

• U.S. Senate Race in Ohio: The unusual contest — with a little-known incumbent and a well-known challenger — shows how Democrats are hoping to capitalize on G.O.P. voters’ anger at the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

• Louisiana Primary: Voters and key voting rights groups filed multiple lawsuits against the governor of Louisiana over his order to suspend the state’s House primary, arguing that he had overstepped his executive powers by delaying the election to give lawmakers time to draw a new congressional map.

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Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, left, is running again for the chamber against Senator Jon Husted, a Republican who was appointed to his seat by the governor to replace Vice President JD Vance. Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times; Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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European Great Tits and 36 other bird species on the continent are more afraid of women than they are of men, according to a recent study—and researchers have no idea why.

In the study, men could get about a meter closer to birds than women could before the animals flew away, according to the results. This pattern remained regardless of what the men and women were wearing, what their height was or how they tried to approach the creatures. That suggests birds may be able to suss out the sex of a human, though the researchers aren’t sure how.

“I fully believe our results, that urban birds react differently based on the sex of the person approaching them, but I can’t explain them right now,” said Daniel Blumstein, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.

The researchers looked at birds living in urban centers in five European countries. They included birds that are known to flee as soon as a human approaches, such as magpies, and those that tend to flap off later, such as pigeons. The outsize fear response to women was consistent across the species.

In the paper, the team hypothesized that birds may be sensing chemical signals, such as pheromones, or using cues such as body shape to recognize a person’s sex. But more research is needed before they can come to any conclusions. Notably, previous findings in mammals also suggest these animals can tell men and women apart: for example, lab rats have been observed to feel greater stress when male researchers handle them than when female researchers do so.

“We have identified a phenomenon, but we really don’t know why. However, what our results do highlight is the birds’ sophisticated ability to evaluate their environment,” said study co-author Federico Morelli, an associate professor at the University of Turin, in the same statement.

“There are several possibilities for what cues birds are picking up on. It could be smells, it could be people’s [gait]. But how do we test this? Perhaps a study resembling Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks,” said Blumstein, referring to the famous British comedy show sketch.

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Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four-stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.

Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?

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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images

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The New York Times won three Pulitzer Prize awards on Monday, including for an investigation into how President Trump is profiting from his deal-making, and news photography documenting starvation and destruction in Gaza. The Times also won for opinion writing, for columns by M. Gessen analyzing the rise of authoritarianism.

The Athletic, the sports site owned by The New York Times Company, won in the audio category for the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out.” The podcast is produced by Meadowlark Media and licensed by The Athletic.

Reuters and The Washington Post each won two awards. The Post won the prestigious public service prize for its exhaustive coverage of the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal agencies, including the extent of job and funding cuts and how they were reshaping the country.

The Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917, are given out annually by Columbia University for excellence in journalism, literature, and the arts. The journalism winners are decided by juries from a pool of more than a thousand entries.

The breaking news reporting prize went to the staff of The Minnesota Star Tribune for coverage of a shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis that left two children dead and injured many more.

The staff of The Times won for investigative reporting for articles that revealed the extent to which Mr. Trump and his inner circle were enriching themselves through national security dealings.

The explanatory reporting award was given to Susie Neilson, Megan Fan Munce, and Sara DiNatale of The San Francisco Chronicle for “Burned,” a series that uncovered the faulty algorithms, used by insurers, that devastated Californians who lost their homes to wildfires.

The Pulitzers reintroduced the beat reporting category this year after 20 years. Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters received the award for their reporting that showed how Meta tolerated ads for scams and banned products to protect its revenue. Reuters was also awarded the prize for national reporting. The staff members involved, including Ned Parker, Linda So, Peter Eisler, and Mike Spector, examined how the president expanded his executive power and sought retribution against his political enemies.

Another new category this year was opinion writing, instead of the previous editorial writing and commentary categories. M. Gessen of The Times was given the award for a collection of reported essays that mixed history and the author’s personal experience in their native Russia to examine the actions of the Trump administration.

The local reporting prize went to two winners. The staff of The Chicago Tribune was recognized for coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s immigration sweep throughout the city. And Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk of The Connecticut Mirror, along with Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne of ProPublica, were recognized for a series that showed how Connecticut’s towing laws have led to abuses by towing companies against drivers.

Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau, Aniruddha Ghosal, and Yael Grauer of The Associated Press were given the international reporting prize for an investigation that showed how governments around the world are using American-made surveillance technology for mass surveillance.

The feature writing prize went to Aaron Parsley of Texas Monthly for his personal account of surviving the Central Texas floods in July that destroyed his home and took the life of his nephew.

Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News was awarded the criticism prize for his architecture criticism, which the Pulitzer Prize Board said used “wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.”

The illustrated reporting and commentary prize went to Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson of Bloomberg for “trAPPed,” a graphic novel that showed how digital scams are targeting wealthy Indians using the threat of arrests and forcing them to comply with bizarre conditions.

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A photo that was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning entry by Saher Alghorra, a contributor to The New York Times, in the breaking news photo category. It showed a child wounded in Gaza City being transferred to a hospital in April last year. Credit…Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

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When the Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century C.E., Europe was plunged into chaos as barbarian Germanic forces advanced south—or so the story goes. But a new study shows that some communities on the continent actually coalesced, becoming more cosmopolitan and diverse.

“Traditionally, the whole story … was seen as a clash of civilizations between Germanic hordes in the north and the Roman Empire in the south,” says Joachim Burger, an anthropologist and a population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. But Burger and his colleagues have shown otherwise: in a new study published today in Nature, they found that “it’s actually more a story of peaceful integration,” he says.

The researchers analyzed human remains at various grave sites in Germany and determined that two genetically distinct groups of people—a settlement of ancient Roman soldiers and a neighboring group of people of northern European descent—intermarried and developed a shared culture, including a common burial method, after the fall of Rome in C.E. 476.

The researchers analyzed 258 ancient genomes collected from grave sites on the Roman Empire’s border in what is now southern Germany that dated to between C.E. 400 and 660. They compared these with a reference set of other ancient and modern genomes and revealed that former Roman soldiers, who carried with them a mix of DNA from Italy, southeastern Europe, and the Balkans, traveled to villages on the empire’s frontier where people with DNA from areas such as what are now northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands lived. The oldest genomes from the burial sites suggest that these two groups didn’t mix much before the fall of Rome. But after that time, they did, with intermixed families being buried together.

These later burials are called row-grave cemeteries because the graves were perfectly parallel to one another. This practice started among communities with northern ancestry but became the norm after the two communities came together. The grave sites also include features that suggest a strong emphasis on monogamy and the nuclear family. And the researchers say these practices, such as kin being entombed together, likely came from Roman culture.

“At the time, this is a quite unique and new pattern that was developed in late Roman society and even codified in laws,” Burger says. “But now we see it … in an early medieval, presumably Germanic society. So late antiquity isn’t actually finished; it’s just transforming into a new, less urban and more agricultural society.”

“It was really a tight kin group,” says Toomas Kivisild, a professor of human evolutionary genetics at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium, who was not involved in the study. Other post-Roman communities in Europe, such as in England, do not show such closeness among families, he says. “The kinship intensity in those cemeteries is far less intense compared to [these new findings].”

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A concise founder-focused article arguing that while attention and virality can be engineered, long-term business value comes from protecting audience trust through disciplined monetization decisions and a clear “Trust Stack” filter.

Key Takeaways

• We live in an era where going viral is often a repeatable process rather than a random stroke of luck.
• Engineered attention can grow your audience fast, but one bad monetization decision can permanently destroy the trust that makes it valuable.

Generating attention is no longer a dark art. It is a highly predictable engineering problem. Between algorithmic hooks, short-form video mechanics, and optimized content funnels, fast-growing founders and operator-led brands can manufacture reach at an unprecedented scale.

We live in an era where going viral is often a repeatable process rather than a random stroke of luck. But while attention can be engineered with the right playbook, trust cannot. For founders building a sustainable business, confusing these two distinct assets is a fatal commercial mistake.

The monetization trap

The moment a founder, creator or operator achieves real scale, whether that means tens of thousands of dedicated newsletter subscribers or hundreds of millions of video views across platforms, the monetization pressure begins. The inbox inevitably fills with partnership offers, sponsorship deals, and affiliate opportunities. On paper, these deals look like pure margin. They offer immediate, high-yield cash flow for simply inserting a pre-roll ad, posting a link or sending a dedicated email.

In reality, many of these offers are highly toxic loans taken directly against your brand’s equity. As the audience’s value grows, the inbound offers become increasingly aggressive. They often rely on fake urgency, manufactured authority, or opaque value propositions designed to separate your followers from their capital as quickly as possible. For founders, the real business choice is rarely about whether they should monetize, but how they can do so without creating irreversible reputational damage.

The cost of manufactured virality

This tension is particularly visible in high-stakes, high-reward niches like finance and fintech, where the cost of bad advice is devastating. Consider the trajectory of Ivan Patriki, a fintech marketing expert, founder of Amora Media, and co-founder and growth operator at QuantMap. Patriki sits at the exact intersection of attention economics, creator growth, and monetization pressure. Having built a large finance audience and generated hundreds of millions of views, he understands intimately that modern virality is deliberately engineered. He has seen exactly how creator funnels in the finance space are built, moving audiences systematically from short-form discovery to long-form authority, and finally into high-ticket conversion funnels.

But Patriki also saw firsthand what happens when that engineered attention reaches critical mass. The inbound monetization opportunities he received often included dubious financial offers, aggressive trading platforms, and products that relied on fake “live” selling environments or manufactured scarcity. The upfront payout for promoting these products is notoriously high, but the cost is entirely borne by the creator’s credibility.

Instead of renting out his audience to the highest bidder for a quick cash injection, Patriki leveraged his understanding of market data and audience needs to co-found QuantMap, a platform backed by decades of market data and long-range historical testing. By building a product that actually served his audience’s need for institutional-grade analytics, he protected his most valuable asset: his trust.

Reputational debt is a commercial liability

Patriki’s experience highlights a critical lesson for any founder or operator-led brand navigating the modern digital landscape. Trust is not a soft, intangible concept reserved for public relations statements; it is a hard, measurable commercial asset. When you endorse a bad partner, promote a misaligned offer, or push a leaky funnel, you might secure a short-term revenue spike. But you also accumulate what is known as reputational debt.

This debt manifests in your business metrics in very real, painful ways: lower future conversion quality, weaker repeat customer rates, a drastic drop in organic referrals, and a deeply skeptical audience that requires higher and higher incentives to take action.

Once an audience learns that a founder views them merely as extraction targets rather than a community to serve, the dynamic changes permanently. Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) skyrockets because your organic reach no longer converts, and your Lifetime Value (LTV) plummets because nobody buys from you twice. Brand recovery in the digital age is incredibly expensive, and in many cases, it is entirely impossible. The internet has a long memory, and a burned audience rarely returns.

The trust stack: A founder’s decision filter

To avoid this trap, fast-growing founders need a rigorous, objective decision filter before they attempt to monetize their attention. Before accepting a sponsorship, launching a partnership, or pushing a new product to your audience, you must evaluate whether the offer strengthens your authority or quietly rents it out. Founders should run every commercial opportunity through a framework we can call the “Trust Stack”:

• Product Clarity and Audience Fit: Is the value proposition immediately clear, or does it rely on obfuscation, complex jargon, and hype? If you cannot explain exactly how the product works, how it makes money, and why your specific audience needs it in one simple sentence, it does not belong on your platform.
• Incentive Transparency: Are the risks, fees, and incentives out in the open? In sectors like fintech, software or health, hidden fees or unstated risks destroy credibility instantly. If a partner asks you to obscure the terms and conditions or downplay the risks, you must walk away.
• Operator Credibility and Compliance: Who is actually behind the offer? Are they operating in a regulated jurisdiction with clear compliance standards, or are they hiding behind offshore entities and anonymous holding companies? You are lending them your face and your reputation; you need to know exactly whose business you are legitimizing.
• User Recourse: If something goes wrong (if the product fails, the software crashes, or the service severely underdelivers), what is the recourse for the user? If your audience gets burned, they will not blame the faceless sponsor or the third-party vendor; they will blame the founder who told them to buy it.
• Reputation Survivability: This is the ultimate stress test. Fast-forward twelve months into the future. If this product, company, or platform collapses publicly in a scandal, will your personal brand and business survive the association? If the answer is no, or even a hesitant maybe, the short-term payout is simply not worth the existential risk to your company.

Long-term authority over short-term extraction

We operate in a highly saturated ecosystem where attention is increasingly commoditized. Anyone with the right playbook, enough capital, or a clever algorithm hack can buy or manufacture their way to a million impressions. But converting those fleeting impressions into a sustainable, high-margin, long-term business requires an audience that fundamentally believes what you say.

Founders must stop viewing their audience as a natural resource to be aggressively mined and start treating them as partners in a long-term ecosystem. A bad monetization strategy is a silent killer; it quietly rents out your hard-earned trust until there is nothing left to sell. By applying a strict trust filter to every commercial decision, founders ensure that every dollar they make today actively strengthens their authority for tomorrow.

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  The Need to Build Trust

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