James' World 2

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If there were ever reason to doubt the dangers of unrestrained artificial intelligence development, those reasons have gone out the window in the last few weeks. What’s next is a vital window of opportunity to slow down A.I. progress so we can better understand these models and avoid the calamity on the horizon.

For years, A.I. skeptics have claimed the technology is merely a “stochastic parrot” trained to predict humans and mimic their behavior and, for that reason, the technology would never live up to its hype. The technology has stubbornly kept improving nevertheless, but most investors and tech executives have kept reassuring us that A.I. is just a tool, even if they were bullish that it was going to change the world. Where both of these sides have agreed was that the specter of A.I. as a looming extinction threat was overblown.

Then OpenAI accidentally created an autonomous swarm of A.I. agents that broke out of a controlled testing environment and orchestrated a complex and difficult cyberattack on its own initiative.

This didn’t occur because the models suddenly became superintelligent; nor were they simply following instructions and parroting their training. Since “reasoning models” rose in late 2024, we’ve seen A.I. trained not just to mimic humans but also to solve millions of hard problems, which they do by learning new behaviors and tendencies. That includes searching for valuable resources that could be key to cracking the problem, and even cheating.

These tendencies can give rise to strange behavior that nobody — not even the models’ creators — can understand, let alone account for and control. The past few weeks are a perfect illustration of why we should find that so alarming.

In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new “reasoning” A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a “swarm.” The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training.

Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.)

The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded “our task doesn’t benefit” from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.

OpenAI is not the only company struggling with this issue. One of Anthropic’s A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model’s chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.

This isn’t the behavior of a mere tool. Microsoft Excel has never impersonated multiple humans and pressured a corporate sales team to generate simpler data that’s easier to process.

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Erik Carter

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At the foundation of photonic quantum computing are pairs of light particles. Linked together through a process called quantum entanglement, these so-called entangled particles mirror each other, no matter the distance between them. And now researchers have shown that good old sunlight can create these specially entwined particles.

In a study published in Optica, a team led by researchers at the University of Ottawa and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen, Germany, generated pairs of entangled photons using nothing more than focused sunlight.

“What we want is really to make quantum technology more and more accessible for everybody,” says Cheng Li, who co-led the work as a graduate student at the University of Ottawa and is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “If it’s possible with sunlight, then you can virtually do it anywhere.”

For decades, physicists have relied on high-energy lasers beamed through special crystals to produce entangled photons—a process called spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The incoming light beam is almost always a laser because physicists long assumed that producing such a strongly ordered connection would require strongly ordered light: A laser’s waves oscillate in lockstep, at a single color. Sunlight, by contrast, is a jumble of wavelengths headed in every direction.

Lasers also come at a high energy cost. They run on electricity, demand constant stabilization and shed much of their power as heat. Physicist Robert Boyd of the University of Ottawa, the new study’s senior author, and his colleagues had already begun probing whether the laser was truly necessary—showing, in theory and in light-emitting diode (LED) experiments, that incoherent light could still yield entanglement, so long as the entanglement depends on a property of light that doesn’t depend on color or direction.

Sunlight is free, which is why it was so appealing. “We take out the electrical-to-optical conversion part of entanglement generation,” Li says. “We go straight from light to light.” Focusing diffuse sunlight onto a millimeter-scale crystal posed its own challenge. Study co-author Hanieh Fattahi’s team at MPL built an all-glass, cone-shaped solar concentrator that funnels light from a window-sized Fresnel lens into a very thin optical fiber.

In outdoor tests at MPL that were conducted over three days, the system’s resulting photon pairs matched a perfectly entangled state with a fidelity of roughly 94 percent and violated Bell’s inequality—a statistical test used to determine if quantum behavior is confirmed —by a modest margin that the team partly attributes to weak seasonal sunlight and passing clouds. The entanglement quality fell slightly short of the best laser-driven sources, but Li ascribes that gap to distortions from the optical components—something further engineering can fix—rather than to the sunlight’s incoherence.

“This is a proof of principle,” Li says. Now the team is working to boost the source’s brightness and entanglement quality toward a field-deployable device.

One day, such a system could help satellites generate quantum encryption keys from the sunlight streaming past them, he says. And with data centers already straining power grids, Li argues, quantum technology’s energy appetite is a problem that it is best to solve before it truly arrives.

“Sunlight is just there,” he says. “We just cut out the middleman and let sunlight do all the work.”

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Too often, questions about regulating AI are either framed by an accelerationist, deregulatory sprint or an argument that drifts toward the abstract—hazy warnings about existential risk, superintelligence, and robots coming for your job someday. Those are too far from what is actually gnawing at people. That is not where the anxiety lives.

Here is where it lives. Life already feels out of control. Run the tape: the 2008 collapse, the Trump years, a pandemic, the social media rewiring of everything, inflation that ate people’s raises, a steady drumbeat of mass shootings. For almost two decades the lesson has been that the ground can move under you at any moment and nobody is holding the wheel. Then AI arrives—and it does not just make life feel more out of control. It takes the wheel.

No say

In nearly 25 years of working in politics, one thing has become clear to me: People want control of their own lives. That is the whole thing. Fully 80% of voters say they have no say in how AI is developed or used; 75% say the problem is not the technology but the people who control it. This is not fear of software. It is the fear of becoming a passenger in your own life.

And the examples are no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration’s new “WISeR” pilot, running in six states, puts AI inside traditional Medicare—algorithms screening whether seniors get the procedures their doctors ordered. Robots weighing in on your hip replacement. The same logic is spreading everywhere: AI deciding who gets fired, AI pricing the groceries on the shelf, AI denying a health claim before any doctor signs off, AI on the battlefield making life-and-death targeting calls. Each one takes a decision that used to belong to a human— to you—and hands it to a system you cannot question. A system built to profit a powerful few.

An agenda that protects control is clear. Your data belongs to you, and no one can sell it without your consent. Parents get to know when a chatbot is talking to their child. And no algorithm—not in firing, not in denying health care claims, not in battlefield decisions about life and death—gets to be the final decision-maker. And the most powerful models get tested by someone independent before they are released—we do not let drug companies sell medicine without approval, and machines this powerful should be no different.

So the fight for Democrats is not “we are for AI” or “we are against AI.” That framing is a trap. The fight is over control. We are the ones who will make sure you still run your own life—that the future is not handed to a narrow class of billionaires using this technology to pad their profits. This is about who leads the future: everyday people, through democracy, or the few who own the machines.

For years, Democrats have found that a message about “freedom” is our most powerful frame, but we too often forget why. It is not that freedom evokes nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell painting. Freedom lands because it means you get control over your own life. When Democrats say it—and mean the freedom to make your own decisions about your body, your family, your money, your future—we win the word back. People want that control back, and restoring it is the whole ball game.

An affirmation of control

None of this is a Luddite pitch. People want the cures, the discoveries, the conveniences, the efficiencies—and we should be for all of it, on one condition: We do not surrender our agency and our judgment to a machine owned by someone else. Regulating AI isn’t just a rejection of oligarchs; it’s an affirmation of control. 

For that argument to land, it has to be real in people’s lives. Look at the closing ad of Alex Bores’s congressional campaign—a race The New York Times called a blueprint for Democrats even though he narrowly lost, after being buried under millions in AI-industry attack ads. His final argument was not a policy paper on his plan to regulate AI. It was Maria and Matt Raine, telling the story of their 16-year-old son, Adam, who was coached toward suicide by a chatbot that had become his closest confidant. 

That ad worked because it was true, and because it answered the only question that matters: who controlled that family’s life—them, or the technology? That is where this argument has to live. Not in the abstract, and not in a debate about whether AI is good or bad, but at the kitchen table, where people feel the difference between holding the wheel and letting go. That is not just the AI argument. It is the whole Democratic argument.

And this runs far beyond AI. Control is the thread through every issue where Democrats win. Healthcare is not just about cuts to institutions; it is that people want to choose their own doctor and their own care, not have that decision made by an insurer or a bureaucrat. Social media is about parents wanting to decide what they and their kids see, not an algorithm deciding for them. Even guns: What people cannot accept is the out-of-control reality that their life could end at a school, a movie theater, or a grocery store through no fault of their own—no say in whether they are the victim. It is all about control. AI is simply where that loss is most fresh right now, which is why it is where the argument needs to go.

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Dick Cheney’s heart problems were never a national secret.

I was Mr. Cheney’s cardiologist for 27 years, including his two terms as vice president. During his time in the White House, he needed stents, a defibrillator and medical treatment for an arrhythmia and a blood clot in his leg. After the defibrillator was implanted in his chest in 2001, he would frequently show visitors to his West Wing office a sample device provided to him by the manufacturer.

Mr. Cheney’s candor about his health was an anomaly for an American politician. Grover Cleveland underwent secret cancer surgery while he was president (on board a yacht for maximum privacy). Franklin Delano Roosevelt hid his use of a wheelchair from the public. Ahead of his campaign for a fourth term, he struggled with severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, but the public was told that the president’s health was “excellent in all respects.” Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance raised concerns that the White House had attempted to conceal the president’s decline. For weeks after his hospitalization this summer, Senator Mitch McConnell shared almost no details about why he was absent from office.

In June, President Trump celebrated his 80th birthday, and at the end of this term he will be the oldest person ever to serve as this nation’s leader. After Mr. Trump’s medical evaluation in May, Dr. Sean Barbabella, the physician to the president, wrote that Mr. Trump “remains in excellent health” and that his “demanding daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, public engagements and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall well-being.”

Despite reassurances from the White House to the contrary, at times over the past year, the president has not looked well. I am not Mr. Trump’s doctor, and have only reviewed his records that have been made public. But Mr. Trump is probably the most photographed president in American history, and a variety of physical ailments are easy to see. He’s had large bruises on both hands, swelling in his legs and episodes when it appears that he is struggling to stay awake. He’s also had advanced imaging performed for unclear reasons. The public is again left to wonder whether the nation’s leader is OK.

Despite the unparalleled power afforded to the president of the United States, there is no formal requirement for the commander in chief to certify his fitness for duty. That’s a mistake. Members of the military, Secret Service agents, commercial pilots, school bus drivers and air traffic controllers all must periodically demonstrate that they are well enough to perform their work. The current practice of reporting the results of a yearly medical examination for the president began in the Nixon administration, but it’s only a custom, not a formal obligation. And, as history has shown, it can be unreliable.

This does not mean that every detail about a president’s health must be disclosed. It’s appropriate to withhold elements of a medical history that could be exploited by an adversary. In 2007, when we replaced Mr. Cheney’s defibrillator, we didn’t share information about a new wireless feature of the device that I considered a security threat to the vice president. (We ultimately were able to get the manufacturer to disable that capacity.)

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the best solution to this problem: It permits Congress to establish a panel outside the executive branch to assess the health and fitness of the president. In April of this year, Representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill to create a congressional commission that would do just that. Ideally, such a panel would be empowered to review data from routine presidential physical examinations, as well as assessments performed when medical concerns emerge.

If such a commission were in place today, these are some of the medical questions it could clarify concerning Mr. Trump’s health. The American public deserves answers to all of them.

1. Dr. Barbabella’s recent report states that the president was evaluated by 22 consultants, an extraordinary number of specialists for even the most extensive executive health evaluation. Why were so many physicians summoned, and what were their specialties?

2. Mr. Trump often shows prominent bruising on his hands, which the White House attributes to frequent handshaking and frequent use of aspirin. Trauma from handshaking has never seemed plausible, and it doesn’t explain why the president’s left hand is often similarly discolored. Also, why would the president take a dose of aspirin four times as high as the dose typically recommended by doctors?

3. Swelling in the president’s legs last summer led to an unscheduled medical evaluation. The president’s physician described the problem as “chronic venous insufficiency,” a condition common in older people, that results from leaky valves in the veins of the legs. It usually develops gradually over a long period. But during Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical examination just a few months earlier, Dr. Barbabella documented no swelling in the president’s legs. If that’s true, his swelling would be by definition acute, not chronic. Acute leg swelling is a potentially much more consequential finding that can be caused by issues such as heart and kidney disease. What’s the reason for this discrepancy?

4. The president often appears to struggle to stay awake, signs of a condition doctors refer to as excessive daytime somnolence. This problem, which is sometimes evident during Oval Office events, was not addressed in the report after Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical exam in May. Although the president is a renowned night owl, his sleepiness seems relatively new. There are several possible causes for the president’s symptoms, some of which could have serious complications if left untreated. Has the president’s medical team identified the source of this issue? And how are they addressing it?

5. In October 2025, Mr. Trump underwent advanced imaging of his heart and abdomen at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president’s physician offered a vague description of the reason for the tests: “to identify issues early, confirm overall health and ensure he maintains long-term vitality and function.” He said the tests did not reveal any abnormalities. Was there a specific symptom or clinical event that prompted this testing?

6. Past Trump medical reports have disclosed the president’s use of the drug finasteride, which prevents hair loss. The drug was not mentioned in the report after Mr. Trump’s most recent medical examination. In response to a query from The Washington Post about its absence, the White House responded, “The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time.” It does not matter, in any material way, if the president is or isn’t taking a hair-loss drug. The more important question is, what medications prescribed for Mr. Trump, if any, has the White House decided to withhold from the public?

7. The president has spoken about how well he performs on cognitive testing. However, the exam that Mr. Trump describes, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a brief and basic screening tool, with simple questions (draw a clock, identify a camel), often performed in response to a concern from the patient or a member of the family. Why has the president undergone this test numerous times, and have there been more sophisticated neurocognitive assessments performed?

Some people would argue that these personal medical details are more than the public deserves to know: After all, Buckingham Palace has not revealed many details about King Charles’s cancer or his treatment.

But the United States does not have a king. In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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A small, yellow-flowered plant that grows in the mountainous forests of China may not look intimidating. But beneath its bright exterior, Saxifraga candelabrum is hiding a bloodthirsty secret.

This plant species is carnivorous, which means it can attract, trap, and digest insect prey and absorb their nutrients. Through a lengthy process of observation, genetic analysis and a fruit fly feast, scientists “left no stones unturned” to prove the plant has a hidden taste for flesh, says Mark Chase, a botanist at England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was not involved in the research.

“Most papers cover only one or two aspects of the carnivorous syndrome, but this study does it all, from observations in the field to isotope work and genomics in the lab,” Chase says.

The discovery supports a 150-year-old hypothesis from the father of evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin predicted in 1875 that some members of the Saxifraga genus could be carnivorous. Though the species he predicted are distinct from S. candelabrum, they share microscopic hairs on their surface. Darwin based his prediction on those hairs, S. candelabrum uses them to trap insects.

Most other carnivorous plants have “highly specialized trapping structures,” says Hang Sun, lead author of the paper and a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This species’ tiny, sticky traps offer a new example of how carnivorous plants might function.

“The discovery of Saxifraga candelabrum reminds us that many inconspicuous carnivorous plants, or plants with partial carnivorous traits, may still exist in nature,” he says.

After observing S. candelabrum plants trapping insects in their natural habitat, the researchers analyzed the plants’ genetic makeup and found similarities to other carnivorous species. They also fed fruit flies to the plants and identified a digestive enzyme that absorbs the insects’ nitrogen. The study was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The discovery of a new carnivorous species is “definitely not an everyday thing,” says Qianshi Lin, a biologist at Lakehead University in Ontario, who was not directly involved in the research but peer-reviewed the study before publication. The last carnivorous plant discovery was announced almost five years ago. Broader genetic understanding of these plants, Lin says, could be “important for the future of agriculture” because transferring certain genes from carnivorous plants into crops could provide a natural pesticide.

The “transformation from prey to predator is a striking adaptive innovation,” the authors write in the study. But exactly how plants evolve to be carnivorous remains a mystery. Answering this question, Chase says, is the next step in the world of these unassuming, murderous plants.

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A YouTube video shows an actual insect capture!

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Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in:

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President Trump boarded Air Force One on July 8 as a ruse.

On the final day of the NATO summit in Turkey, Mr. Trump walked up the stairway to the plane that was supposed to carry him on the first leg of his journey home. He briefly waved to the cameras and disappeared inside one of the iconic, baby blue 747s that have served as Air Force One for decades. Then he secretly exited the aircraft, hidden inside a catering container.

Mr. Trump was next taken to a military jet for a clandestine flight out of Turkey. The 747, filled with journalists, White House officials, aides and others, took off despite what was deemed a credible threat from Iran against Air Force One.

It was an extraordinary subterfuge, aimed at protecting an American president who has been in Iran’s cross hairs for years.

The latest threat had emerged as Mr. Trump began his final day in Turkey. According to two officials with knowledge of the threat, U.S. intelligence picked up multiple streams of information overnight: that the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying, including which floor, and that someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile.

U.S. officials immediately began concocting a plan. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was integral to assessing the threat and deciding how to respond. General Caine is no stranger to subterfuge: His last job was Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., and he helped devise the diversion tactics during Operation Midnight Hammer, when U.S. forces struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025.

Not everyone who rode on the plane without Mr. Trump was in the dark. Secretary of State Marco Rubio knew about the threat and flew on the old plane after helping to plan the operation to spirit the president out of Turkey, according to two U.S. officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Other senior officials who traveled on the plane without the president included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; as well as several other White House staff, according to a senior U.S. official. It was not clear whether they all knew about the threat.

The elaborate deception — which was first reported by The Washington Post, and which ended without any harm coming to either Air Force One or the military jet carrying Mr. Trump — raised questions about the security trade-offs in protecting the commander in chief.

Whether or not the passengers on the plane that Mr. Trump left behind knew about the threat, they were exposed to risks that the Secret Service deemed too great for the president to face.

On Tuesday evening, in his first public comments about the secret evacuation, Mr. Trump said the decision was not his.

“It’s really just up to Secret Service,” he told reporters after returning from Ohio. “I just follow what they like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane for safety.”

Here’s how this all came about.

Trump tells reporters he will fly on the old Air Force One

Before leaving the summit, Mr. Trump posted on social media that, for “old time’s sake,” he would fly out on the old Air Force One instead of the luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on.

He later told reporters that he was sending the donated plane to Europe to “two or three of the big bases” to show it off to the military there.

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

I don’t need to spew a bunch of statistics to convince you that people don’t smoke like they used to. Because while it’s true that the unhealthy habit saw a steady decline once the public became widely aware of the dangers of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, it’s also true that we had a definitive vibe shift. I was born in ‘92, so I’m just old enough to remember the days of smoking sections in restaurants, and now it shocks my sensibilities to see someone lighting up in an outdoor dining area. Which is how it should be, because smoking is really bad for you. It can cause numerous cancers, potentially fatal lung disease, and heart failure, to name just the real heavy hitters. It’s also associated with increased risk of autoimmune disease, type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction—and the list goes on and on.

But while the data we have on smoking in the U.S. still shows the low rates one would expect for an activity that we know is really, really bad for us, the vibes have shifted again. Many have noticed that young folks on social media are glamorizing cigarettes, and some experts suspect that public health data just hasn’t caught up to show a new smoking surge.

Here to tell us more is Adam Kovac, a breaking news reporter here at Scientific American. Adam, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

Adam Kovac: Uh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Feltman: I do wanna make sure we define for our listeners what Gen Z actually is, lest we, you know, repeat the sins of our forebears and just use that to mean “young person” for the next 15 years. Who are Gen Z? Who are they? [Laughs.]

Kovac: Well, as a millennial, I definitely feel that pain. So Gen Z is technically anybody born between the years 1997 and 2012. So it’s not kids anymore. These are people who are entering the workforce; they’re older teenagers; they’re young adults. So that’s who Gen Z actually is.

Feltman: So tell me about the genesis of the article. You know, what are people saying about Gen Z and cigarettes?

Kovac: So the genesis of this article is a little bit weird for Scientific American, where we do so much stuff that’s based off of data and having, you know, really concrete, provable things in front of us. This is really more of a vibe. There’s just, like, a sense in the air that’s …

Feltman: What’s more Gen Z than there just being a vibe, you know?

Kovac: Exactly, exactly. It’s a vibe shift, I think is the term, although I think I might’ve just dated myself there. It’s something that is, like cigarette smoke, up in the air.

There’s just a sense that a lot of Gen Z celebrities are being photographed smoking. If you walk outside of bars, you know, you’ll see a huddle of young adults all kind of lighting up. It’s something that, like, I feel like I would’ve seen when I was younger and then disappeared for a long time, and it—now it’s making this big comeback.

Feltman: Hmm. So what does the data on smoking actually say, you know, once you started poking at it?

Kovac: When I actually started looking at the data, smoking has been on a really steady decline for about half a century now. You know, ever since they started putting warning labels on cigarette packages and really getting the word out about all the negative health effects that cigarettes can have—the lung cancer, the emphysema, the asthma—it really reduced. Like, so it used to be about 50 percent of American adults were smokers, and that number has just been steadily declining for decades. And in most recent surveys, it’s somewhere around 10 percent of Americans are smokers now. So it’s really at historic lows.

Feltman: Do we know anything about Gen Z specifically? You know, are they also, you know, showing those low, steady decline smoking rates in the data?

Kovac: So actually, it shows that the decline is even steeper with them. Depending on the survey that you look at only around 5 percent of Gen Z say that they’ve smoked a cigarette in the last 30 days. So it’s really, really low numbers when you look at the data.

Feltman: So my understanding is that the story isn’t “the vibe seems to be that Gen Z is smoking, but it turns out they’re not.” The experts you talked to were not reassured by that data. Can you tell us a little bit about why?

Kovac: So this kind of data usually comes in at a bit of a lag. So a lot of them are very alarmed by what they’re seeing, particularly because, you know, you can kind of quantify a vibe a little bit. There’s a lot of data showing that images of smoking in popular culture are on the rise. It used to be for several years, you know, if you saw somebody smoking in a movie or a TV show, that was the exception, not the rule.

You know, as somebody who watches The Bear and who loved Oppenheimer, you know, there’s a lot of smoking in a lot of popular culture right now. So they’re really alarmed by that. And Gen Z doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of movies or a lot of TV. They get a lot of their media consumption through TikTok, through Twitch and through Instagram, and there’s actually a lot of accounts on there that are kind of oriented toward that. I found one on Instagram that’s called Cigfluencers that has 100,000 followers, and it’s just pictures of celebrities and young, attractive people looking really cool holding cigarettes.

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He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead. 

More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.

“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”

La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.

The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE. 

By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.” 

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Left: Chaofeng Ge. Right: Parady La with his daughter, Jazmine La.Courtesy of Yanfeng Ge; Courtesy of Jazmine La

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President Trump may want to let go of the Middle East. But it won’t let go of him.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said his new strategy was to be “low-keying it” in Iran, a suggestion that he wants to pressure the country into making a favorable deal without taking major military action. But a stark reminder of the limits of U.S. power in the region came from Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday he was “ruling out” Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The two Middle East conflicts have underscored Mr. Trump’s eagerness to declare success and his inability to impose his will on them, despite the enormous military firepower that he has been able to deploy.

Mr. Trump is “clearly trying to find a pathway as the midterms approach to downgrade all of this,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Instead, Mr. Katulis went on, “reality is slapping him in the face.”

Mr. Trump faces depleted weapons stockpiles, an Iranian regime determined to impose pain on the United States, an Israeli prime minister battling for re-election and American voters reeling from high prices induced by the Iran war. The November midterms keep ticking closer, steadily raising the political costs of the turmoil to Mr. Trump and Republicans.

Mr. Trump laid out his low-key approach to Iran in a brief interview with the news website Axios on Sunday. Rather than make new military threats, he said that “we are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

“Now, can they make trouble? Yeah, they can make trouble,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday, acknowledging Iran’s ability to keep harassing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “But they’re broke.”

In describing the Iranian regime as suffering from economic pressure, Mr. Trump evoked his own predicament. The average price of a gallon of gasoline remained above $4 this week, more than $1 above the price when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. Polls show even Republicans growing disenchanted with the Iran war, and Mr. Trump’s political movement has fractured over his decision to launch military action.

“I don’t think the president has very good options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The pressure points for the Iranians are, while real, more endurable and bearable than those that are impacting the U.S. economy and the strategic calculus of the administration.”

In Gaza, Mr. Trump trumpeted a “historic breakthrough” on July 30, a multiphase deal under which the militant group Hamas would eventually disarm and Israel withdraw from the Palestinian enclave. Writing on his Truth Social website, in all capitals, he hailed an “amazing development” that “everybody said could never be achieved.”

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President Trump boarding Air Force One in New Jersey on Sunday. Over the weekend, he said his strategy is to be “low-keying” it in Iran. Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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