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The first flavor that comes to mind when you think of chicken wings might be buffalo — and it’s a classic for a reason. However, there are plenty of other sauces and rubs to try, whether baking, frying, or grilling your wings.Smoked chicken wings with ranch dressing, crispy garlic-glazed chicken wings, or even limoncello-marinated chicken wings with pepperoni sauce (pepperoni! sauce!) will take your game day and Super Bowl spreads to the next level. With dozens of chicken wing recipes to choose from, you’re sure to appreciate some old favorites and add a few new varieties to your game day repertoire.
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The crackdown on dissent and speech in Minnesota this winter follows a pattern that is common in countries that slide from democracy to autocracy: A leader enacts a legally dubious policy. Citizens protest that policy. The government responds with intimidation and force. When people are hurt, the government blames them and lies about what happened.
The New York Times editorial board published an index in October tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before President Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but one of the world’s healthiest democracies. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran, or Russia.
Based on recent events, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — stifling speech and dissent — up one notch, to Level 4:
Stifling speech and dissent
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his personal interests, targeting people for legally dubious reasons while creating a culture in which his allies can act with impunity. The targets include Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, and several Democratic. True authoritarians go much further, but Mr. Trump has already undone the post-Watergate depoliticization of the Justice Department.
The wide-ranging abuses in Minnesota are the main reason for the change. The Trump administration is conducting a military-style operation in an American city under dubious pretenses. The stated goal is immigration enforcement, even though the state is home to relatively few undocumented immigrants. The true goal seems to be instilling fear in people who oppose Mr. Trump’s agenda. Federal agents have killed two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and assaulted and menaced others. The administration has made clear that the abusers will face no accountability.
The acceleration in the stifling of dissent and speech is broader than what’s happening in Minnesota. Since late last year, the administration has also widened its campaign of investigating perceived enemies, such as Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair. The Department of Homeland Security has used subpoenas that no judge approved to demand information on critics. The F.B.I. searched the home of a journalist who had exposed problems with the administration’s policies.
Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy. Many forms of speech and dissent remain vibrant in the United States, in courts, in Congress, the media, and on the streets. But Mr. Trump and his allies have restricted dissent in fundamental ways. It is a violation of basic American values.
Modern authoritarian takeovers often do not start with a military coup. They instead involve an elected leader who uses the powers of the office to consolidate authority and make political opposition difficult. The repression of speech and dissent is central to this process. Even before recent months, Mr. Trump had done so by punishing law firms that had opposed him, revoking the visas of foreign students who criticized the war in Gaza and contributing to intimidation campaigns against federal judges.
Autocrats use the immense power of law enforcement as a political tool, and Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his interests. It targets his perceived enemies, such as Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, on shaky grounds while dropping legitimate investigations of Mr. Trump’s allies or pardoning them. True authoritarians go much further, but Mr. Trump has undone the post-Watergate bipartisan efforts to depoliticize the Justice Department.
When a democracy slides toward autocracy, the leader often finds ways to neuter the legislature. The Trump administration has violated the law by withholding funding authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has gutted congressionally authorized agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has imposed new taxes — his tariffs — without congressional approval. He has ordered overseas military attacks without consulting Congress in ways that his recent predecessors did.
Would-be authoritarians recognize that courts can keep them from consolidating power, and they take steps to weaken or bypass judges. At times, the Trump administration has openly defied federal judges. A judge in Minnesota recently excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement for disobeying nearly 100 orders in January alone. On other occasions, the administration has engaged in gamesmanship, ignoring the spirit of judicial orders.
Autocrats often curtail democracy by declaring an emergency and arguing that the threat requires them to exercise unusual degrees of power. Mr. Trump’s recent predecessors were not perfect on this issue, but he has reached another level. His sweeping tariffs are one example. Justifying deportations by claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over American cities is another example.
Authoritarians frequently and performatively use the military for domestic control. Mr. Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles to crack down on protests. He has also begun to treat the military as an extension of himself, firing high-ranking officials without good reason and giving overtly political speeches to military readers. ICE is not part of the military, but it is acting largely as a paramilitary force in Minnesota and elsewhere.
Authoritarians tend to demean minority groups, trying to turn them into perceived threats that provide justification for a leader to amass power. Mr. Trump has vilified immigrants and transgender Americans. His appointees and political allies have made blatantly racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic statements. Mr. Trump has denigrated Somalis in outrageous ways, such as saying, “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country.”
Democratic governments prize accurate information. Authoritarians seek to suppress inconvenient truths. The Trump administration has sought to manipulate government information by, among other things, sidelining scientific experts. The administration has also taken steps to control the media, using the threat of regulatory punishment to silence criticism.
Trying to take over universities
Authoritarians, recognizing that universities are hotbeds of independent thought and political dissent, often single them out for repression. A signature policy of Mr. Trump’s second term has been his attack on higher education. He has cut millions of dollars of research funding, tried to dictate hiring and admissions policies, and taken steps to dictate what colleges can teach.
Creating a cult of personality
Emperors and kings often glorified themselves by displaying their portraits everywhere. The American tradition rejected that hagiography for living presidents — until Mr. Trump. Among recent examples: He rebranded the Kennedy Center to add his own name. The Board of Peace for Gaza will be housed at an institute newly named for him. And the government now sells a so-called gold card, with his face on it, that costs $1 million and offers legal residency to immigrants.
Using power for personal profit
Authoritarians often turn the government into a machine for self-enrichment. Mr. Trump glories in his administration’s culture of corruption. He rewards foreign governments that bestow gifts on him (like a 747 airplane) and approve deals with his company. His family has made hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto. In some cases, he has later helped his benefactors, including by giving pardons.
Manipulating the law to stay in power
Authoritarians change election rules to help their party, and they rewrite laws to ignore term limits. In Mr. Trump’s second term, he has shown worrisome signs of trying to entrench the power of the Republican Party — and recently taken steps to accelerate that campaign. In February, he called for the federal government to take over control of election administration from states. That builds on earlier moves, such as an executive order that would force states to reject some mail-in ballots.
Background and methodology: The clearest sign that a democracy has died is that a leader and his party make it impossible for their opponents to win an election and hold power. Once that stage is reached, however, the change is extremely difficult to reverse.
The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand how much Mr. Trump is eroding American democracy. The categories are based on interviews with legal scholars, political scientists, historians, and other democracy experts. The ratings come from the New York Times editorial board. In our 0-to-10 scales, zero represents roughly where the United States, flawed though it was, had been under presidents of both parties prior to Mr. Trump. Ten represents the condition in a true authoritarian state. Moving even one notch toward autocracy is a worrisome sign.
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Frontal Assault
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Click the link belowfor the complete article (and charts):
Scientists have found a key brain network that’s disrupted by Parkinson’s disease, according to a study published today in Nature. The results change doctors’ understanding of what causes Parkinson’s symptoms and may unlock more effective and precise treatments.
Parkinson’s has long been considered a movement disorder. Its hallmark symptoms include involuntary muscle contractions, tremor and difficulty walking. But the disease can also disrupt sleep, blood pressure regulation, digestion and cognitive function. The movement-related symptoms can worsen when someone with the disease is under stress, for example, but improve while they are listening to music.
The common factor underlying these seemingly disconnected symptoms, according to the new results, is a brain network that was only discovered in 2023. Called the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, it links the mind and the body to turn thoughts into actions. The researchers found that targeting this network with brain-stimulating treatments could better alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
“Parkinson’s is not just a movement problem involving one body part. This study shows it is a whole-body brain network disorder that links movement, thinking, arousal and internal body control,” says Michael Okun, a neurologist at the University of Florida and medical director of the Parkinson’s Foundation, who was not involved in the study.
It’s an “extraordinary” set of findings, says Todd Herrington, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who treats and studies Parkinson’s.
A Strange Pattern
Neuroscientists have long known that a region of the brain called the primary motor cortex, nicknamed M1, controls the body’s movements. This headband-shaped brain strip extends from ear to ear and contains a “map” of the entire body—often visualized as a distorted humanoid figure called the homunculus. If you want to move your hand, higher-level brain regions closer to your forehead send signals back to M1, which in turn sends motor signals to the hand.
But neurologist Nico Dosenbach of Washington University in St. Louis had observed something strange. When a person in a brain scanner moves their mouth, multiple parts of M1—not just the “mouth” region—activate. These extra spots of activation “just didn’t make sense, if all the things I thought I knew were true,” he says.
It turns out that neuroscientists had been underestimating M1 for nearly a century. M1 is not a simple map of the body. Interspersed between body-part-specific areas are nodes of a network that coordinates higher-level planning for movement. Instead of being a mere foot soldier following orders from more frontal brain regions, M1 helps plan, guide and coordinate action. Dosenbach and his colleagues named the network the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, reflecting how it bridges the body and the mind.
These findings caught the eye of Hesheng Liu, a neuroscientist at Changping Laboratory in Beijing. For a decade, he’d been studying Parkinson’s disease, trying to figure out how a treatment called deep-brain stimulation (DBS) works to alleviate symptoms. His team had noticed the strange patterns in M1, too. “We had no idea what they are,” Liu says. When he saw Dosenbach’s paper on SCAN, everything started to make sense. “Probably, that region is behind Parkinson’s disease,” he thought.
A Mind-Body Network
Doctors don’t know what sets off the chain of events that cause Parkinson’s disease. But they know which brain area it most devastates: the substantia nigra, a structure deep in the brain, where neurons that produce the brain signaling chemical dopamine slowly die off.
Stimulating other regions connected to the substantia nigra can alleviate Parkinson’s symptoms, suggesting an entire circuit is involved. Researchers knew that M1 was part of this circuit—and the new results show that it specifically involves the SCAN regions of M1 that plan and coordinate movement. Using multiple brain-imaging datasets from 863 real people with Parkinson’s and healthy individuals, Liu’s team found that SCAN was overlyconnected to deep-brain regions in those with Parkinson’s but not in healthy people or those with other movement disorders. Individuals with Parkinson’s who had higher connectivity in this circuit experienced worse symptoms.
The researchers also found that existing treatments for Parkinson’s, including the medication levodopa (also known as L-DOPA), as well as brain stimulation, decreased the circuit’s connectivity, making the brains of people with the condition look more like those of healthy people. The more a treatment reduced someone’s SCAN connectivity, the more their motor function improved.
Doctors don’t yet know if dying neurons in the substantia nigra cause these SCAN disruptions, or vice versa, says Michael D. Fox, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study. Neurons begin dying decades before symptoms appear, so it seems likely that the former may cause the latter. But it’s “not impossible” that the SCAN dysfunction could start early, too, and cause more neurons to die, he says.
Guiding Better Treatment
Brain stimulation treatments for Parkinson’s were more effective when doctors specifically targeted SCAN regions, Liu’s team also found. This experiment involved a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS, in which doctors place a wand containing a magnetic coil over the scalp, just on top of M1. Previous studies had shown that the treatment improved symptoms but wasn’t more effective than the medication levodopa. In part because of that limitation, Fox says, TMS isn’t offered clinically to people with Parkinson’s.
But focusing TMS on SCAN regions specifically can improve results, Liu’s team showed. “I’m excited by these results,” Fox says. TMS may be more appealing and accessible to patients than deep-brain stimulation, which requires surgery. “This, in my mind, elevates the potential of noninvasive brain stimulation for helping patients with Parkinson’s in a way that wasn’t there before,” Fox says.
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The brain’s motor circuit runs from deep brain structures up to motor regions in cortex. dani3315/Getty Images
Our kids’ school winter vacation schedule is a little wonky; they have a few long weekends off, but then we don’t get a real break till March. It’s not quite enough to go somewhere far away, but when you’re trapped inside with two active boys, those three-day weekends at home feel long. A few years ago, I went on a hunt to find a way to break up that interminable winter slog, to silence the ever-present voices of my sons: “Mom, there’s nothing to do!” (I know there’s nothing to do! It’s freezing out, most team sports are on pause, and by Sunday afternoons the siren call of the iPad becomes deafening to the point of no return.)
I researched. I asked around. Eventually, a friend recommended Mohonk Mountain House, a historic resort that’s about a two-hour drive from New York City. We decided to give it a go. We haven’t looked back.
The place has a kind of old school Catskills-vibe, like if Dirty Dancing met a haunted gothic novel. You can leave after school on a Friday and, after driving up an ear-popping mountain pass, arrive at the enormous, Victorian castle-esque building in time for dinner. The place was founded in 1869, and the aesthetic leans into that history (wood everything, old photographs of Mohonk lining the walls; traditional décor). It’s kind of like The Shining if The Shining was cozy instead of creepy, and the kids, in particular, think it’s very cool.
Mohonk is an all-inclusive resort, so the room rate covers food (but not alcohol). There are set times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the main dining room has lovely views of the mountain and surrounding area. The food is…plentiful. It comes quickly. Breakfast and lunch include buffets the size of a small country. You won’t go hungry at Mohonk Mountain House, that I promise. I’ve never been on a cruise, but I assume that it’s kind of like high-end cruise fare, which isn’t an insult. This is a place that’s best for families. In and out, I say! Let’s get it done with before the kids start asking to play games on our phones.
Most critically, there is a lot to do during the day. There is a heated indoor pool, which my kids love to swim in, and a soothing spa, where you can get facials and massages. There is snow tubing, which my sons enjoy almost as much as I do. There’s a private ice-skating rink with skate rentals included. You can hike up the mountain with spikes, or do cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing as a family. The grounds are picturesque and winter wonderland-y, and every afternoon there’s an open fire pit where you can roast a marshmallow (or five, if you’re my 7-year-old). There are evening activities, like movies, music, and magicians. Last year, we tried indoor archery for the first time. I hit a bullseye. There is no more to that story. I just wanted to share. And the service is family-oriented and helpful. A couple of years ago, my younger son got a horrible stomach virus the night we arrived at Mohonk. He was so sick that we ended up calling the in-house doctor at the hotel, who came right away and said we should go to the nearby hospital to be safe. So my husband sped our car down the dark mountain road while I held my little retching son in the front seat, our other son strapped into the back. Everything was fine, eventually — the hospital was great, our son got fluids, and we stayed until he finally stopped vomiting his brains out. We got back to Mohonk at 3am, exhausted and stressed, and saw that management had put lovely baskets in our room filled with get-better stuffed animals, fresh fruit and snacks, and an array of games for the kids. They continually checked in on us until we left the following day, and all things considered, we had an okay time! Oh, the wonders of traveling with children. The best part about Mohonk, hands down, is that every time we go there, it snows. There’s like some magical timer that knows we’ve arrived, and waking up to the mountain blanketed in white is such a treat for the kids. I can’t guarantee that it’ll happen for you, but if you’d like to coordinate dates with me, just let me know! It never fails.
I feel lucky that our family found this place. It’s so good for kids. We usually arrive in a kind of winter funk and leave with a rosy glow, just enough to get me through until spring. Unsurprisingly, Mohonk has a kind of cult following—families return year after year, and we’ve now gone enough times to recognize people, giving them friendly nods on the trails or the ice rink or while going back for a third piece of cake at the buffet. Winter is coming, which, as a mom, feels daunting, but at least I have Mohonk to look forward to. Another bullseye is in my future.
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My family has been going to Mohonk Mountain House for years for a reason. Shutterstock
President Trump’s declaration that he wants to “nationalize” voting in the United States arrives at a perilous moment for the relationship between the federal government and top election officials across the country.
While the executive branch has no explicit authority over elections, generations of secretaries of state have relied on the intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses, among other assistance, that only the federal government can provide.
But as Mr. Trump has escalated efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters while also eliminating programs designed to fortify these systems against attacks, secretaries of state and other top state election officials, including some Republican ones, have begun to sound alarms. Some see what was once a crucial partnership as frayed beyond repair.
They point to Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, his continued false claims that the contest was rigged, the presence of election deniers in influential government positions, and his administration’s attempts to dig up evidence of widespread voter fraud that year, even though none has ever been found.
The worry, these election officials say, is that Mr. Trump and his allies might try to interfere in or cast doubt on this year’s midterm elections. The president is urgently trying to defend the Republican majorities in Congress, and the political environment has appeared to grow less friendly to his party.
On Tuesday, a day after Mr. Trump’s comments about wanting to “nationalize” elections, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president was referring to federal election legislation in Congress. Yet after Ms. Leavitt’s attempt to clarify Mr. Trump’s initial remarks, he doubled down on his assertion that the federal government should oversee state elections.
“Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that,” he said. “The federal government should get involved.”
Even before Mr. Trump’s latest remarks, state officials had pointed to other evidence of his aims regarding elections.
The F.B.I. seized ballots and other 2020 voting records last week from an election office in Fulton County, Ga., which on Wednesday challenged the seizure in court. The Justice Department has sued nearly half of the states in the country to try to obtain their full voter rolls with Americans’ personal information in an effort to build a national voter database.
Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a threatening letter to Democratic officials in one of those states, Minnesota, suggesting that the administration might wind down its immigration enforcement efforts there in exchange for concessions, including handing over its voter data.
The New York Times also reported that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with F.B.I. field agents the day after the Fulton County search and called Mr. Trump, allowing the president to talk on speakerphone with agents involved in the investigation.
“We can’t trust the federal government, and they are now adversaries of the states,” Shenna Bellows, the Democratic secretary of state in Maine and who is a candidate for governor, said in an interview. “They are abusing their power by trying to build this national voter database that is completely outside of the scope of their authority under the Constitution, and they’re afraid to actually engage in dialogue.”
The tensions are a sharp shift for election officials in the states — which the Constitution dictates are in charge of carrying out elections — after decades of close alliance with the federal government.
These officials — who are much more accustomed to policy nuance and procedural debate than the raw politics of the Trump era — bristle at the administration’s insinuations that they are doing a poor job and are not securing the country’s elections.
“The things that have been said publicly, frankly, are quite appalling,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Republican of Utah, said last week at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Washington. She was speaking during a question-and-answer session with Jared Borg, a deputy director at the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Ms. Henderson, who oversees Utah’s elections, called out Ms. Bondi in particular and the Justice Department’s efforts to push states to hand over their voter rolls.
“She’s pretty much slandered all of us,” Ms. Henderson said. “And to me, that’s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.”
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Some Democratic state election officials, including Shenna Bellows, secretary of state in Maine, have spoken out about President Trump’s efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters. Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, boys are about three times more likely to be diagnosed as autistic than girls are. Scientists have sought an answer as to why that imbalance exists: some have argued it is to do with male and female brains; others have proposed that genetic differences or some other biological factor could hold an answer. And there is evidence that some girls and women are misdiagnosed—or missed altogether.
But a new study involving millions of people in Sweden shows women and men are almost equally as likely to be diagnosed with autism by adulthood—suggesting younger girls may be underdiagnosed and possibly missing out on critical care.
Scientists followed 2.7 million children born in Sweden between 1985 and 2020, about 2.8 percent of whom had been diagnosed as autistic by 2022. In early childhood, boys were much more likely to receive an autism diagnosis. But as the cohort aged, the researchers identified a “catch-up” effect—by age 20, women were almost just as likely to have received an autism diagnosis as men. The research was published in the BMJ.
The study is “interesting” and “well done,” says David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who points to the study’s 35-year period and extensive dataset.
Gina Rippon, a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in England and author of the book The Lost Girls of Autism, agrees. The results are “powerful” and “sound,” Rippon says. “This is a really rigid, perhaps classically Scandinavian-type study, where the data is amazing data, collected over time, valid, reliable, etcetera.”
Indeed, because the study relied on clinical diagnoses, its findings may in fact be a “conservative” estimate of autism rates among women, she adds.
It’s not totally clear what may be driving the early diagnosis gap between boys and girls. One possibility is “systemic biases in diagnosis,” wrote patient and patient advocate Anne Cary in a related BMJ editorial. In other words, the way clinicians diagnose autism may be missing girls. Girls, “out of instinct or necessity,” may also be masking the condition.
And that has real consequences. Delayed diagnoses can mean that autistic people have to work harder to get the right treatment and may be misdiagnosed with conditions like anxiety or ADHD in the meantime.
Rippon says the new study may be a step toward correcting that legacy. “If this study does nothing other than indicate what is going on in the recognition of autistic women, then that will be great,” she says.
A 10-year-old Minnesota girl has been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after a month in detention in Dilley, Texas, school officials said, one of hundreds of children detained at the facility.
Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, a fourth-grader, and her mother walked free from the immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, on Tuesday night. Elizabeth is a student in the school district of Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, which is also home to five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was released from Dilley over the weekend amid widespread outrage about his detention.
Elizabeth and her mother were taken by federal agents on 6 January, the first of five students from the Columbia Heights district to be detained by ICE during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the region, school leaders said. The family, originally from Ecuador, has an active asylum case, school officials said.
The girl and her mother were at a Texas shelter as of Wednesday morning, a family attorney said, and would be heading back to Minnesota to reunite with her father.
There have been growing concerns about Elizabeth’s health as federal officials confirmed that Dilley, which houses families, is now the site of a measles outbreak. Hundreds of children are detained at the facility.
Carolina Gutierrez, principal secretary at Highland elementary, Elizabeth’s school, has been assisting the family and told the Guardian on Wednesday that the girl was experiencing flu-like symptoms and her mother had broken out in hives, but they had not yet received a medical assessment.
“I’m just excited to see Elizabeth come back to school. I’m extremely happy and relieved, and we have to continue advocating and speaking up for other people to come home,” Gutierrez said.
Elizabeth and her mother had been picked up by agents on the way to school, and the girl was able to call her father during the arrests, acting as an interpreter for her family and telling her dad that officers would drop her off at school, Gutierrez said.
The father has said he rushed to the elementary school and waited for hours with school staff, but Elizabeth never arrived. By the end of that day, Elizabeth and her mother had both already been flown to Texas. Tracy Xiong, a school social worker, recounted the episode at a press conference on Tuesday with Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, saying the father had been inconsolable after his family was picked up, according to the Sahan Journal, a local news outlet.
“That image of Elizabeth’s father will stay with me forever,” Xiong said. “I watched him sit in his car, bury his head in his hands, and cry uncontrollably.”
When Elizabeth was detained, she assumed she was being sent back to Ecuador, Gutierrez said: “When she was flown to Texas, she thought her dreams were over. She dreams of being a doctor. She’s pleaded with her dad: ‘Get me out of here. I want to go back home. I want to go back to school. I want to eat good food.’ … Mom and Dad didn’t understand why they were being treated like this. They were like, we didn’t do anything wrong.”
Gutierrez, who has been working with the father and raising funds for the family, said: “He has been sad and desperate for answers. He hasn’t been able to sleep. He doesn’t have an appetite. He felt very helpless.”
Elizabeth’s case was assigned to the US judge Fred Biery, who had ordered Liam’s release. The judge argued that the boy’s case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children”.
Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, in San Antonio, Texas, on 31 January after being released from the Dilley detention center. Photograph: Joaquin Castro via AP
On Monday, Biery issued an order blocking the removal or transfer of Elizabeth and her mother and giving the federal government five days to respond to the family’s release petition.
Their sudden release the following day came as something of a surprise, said Bobby Painter, managing attorney with the Texas Immigration Law Council, a non-profit representing the family.
Elizabeth and her mother should never have been detained, he said: “This didn’t have to happen. This is a family going through the process as it was intended. They presented at the border as asylum seekers and were admitted to the country. That case is still ongoing. They did everything they were supposed to do and still found themselves detained and separated.”
Painter said Elizabeth was an “avid reader” and “really wants to get back into that routine”.
In the wake of growing backlash against the detention of Elizabeth, Liam, and other Minnesota students, including a two-year-old girl, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said it gives arrested parents an opportunity to have their children detained with them or placed into the custody of another adult.
But Columbia Heights officials have countered that agents have made it difficult or impossible for parents to place their children with others during often chaotic arrests.
The DHS defended the detention of the girl in a statement, saying that after Elizabeth’s mother was arrested, “officers allowed her to make phone calls to place the child in the custody of someone she designated”. The DHS’s statement said: “She failed to find a trusted adult to care for the child, so officers kept the family together for the welfare of the child.”
That account is contradicted by the assertions of her family and school officials, who said the father was ready to take custody, and the DHS did not respond to questions about the discrepancies.
The DHS also said Elizabeth’s mother had a “final order of removal”. Painter disputed that characterization, saying one judge had denied asylum, but the family filed a timely appeal, which is still pending, meaning there is no final removal order.
Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private prison corporation that runs Dilley, declined to comment on Elizabeth’s case and the measles outbreak, saying in an email that CoreCivic has doctors and mental health professionals on staff who “meet the highest standards of care”. Dilley, Todd said, provides residents a “continuum of health care services, including screening, prevention, health education, diagnosis and treatment”.
Liam’s case received international attention after his photo went viral, but his case is not unique, advocates say.
ICE booked about 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old, according to a Guardian analysis of detention data.
“Family detention is very traumatic for children, even for relatively short periods,” Painter said. “Children should not be detained under any circumstances, period. The entire practice of family detention is immoral and bad policy, and I hope there is continued public attention on this until we don’t have any more kids in this position.”
Gutierrez said the community had stepped up to defend families, but that the detention of Elizabeth and others had taken a toll on families: “The trauma is following these kids into classrooms. The students fear for themselves and their classmates. Every day, they wonder if they are going to see their classmates tomorrow.”
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Elizabeth Caisaguano. Photograph: Columbia Heights school district
In the long-running power struggle between the legislative and executive branches, a House Republican’s success this week at forcing a former president to agree to be deposed in a congressional investigation counted as a triumph for Congress.
The victory of Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, in a monthslong battle with Bill and Hillary Clinton over testifying on Capitol Hill in his panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation marked a singular moment.
No former president has ever been compelled to testify to Congress under subpoena.
Members of Congress don’t necessarily think that is a good thing; they want the ability to bring in former presidents when they are relevant witnesses and may have something meaningful to say. And Mr. Comer’s move was a rare power play by a Republican lawmaker at a time when the G.O.P.-led House and Senate have ceded much of their power to the White House.
But his accomplishment also amounted to a remarkable use of government power to target a political adversary — the kind seen more often in autocratic societies where a peaceful transfer of power is not a given because leaders fear ending up in prison after leaving office. And it was one that some experts said further chipped away at the country’s democratic norms.
“It’s something we would do in a banana republic,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley. “The depositions will be controlled by Comer. The lighting could be odd, or sketchy, to make the Clintons look like criminals. It will generate conspiracy stories and they will try to show that the Democrats are the party of corruption, not the Republicans.”
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview that, “like all powers of Congress or any other branch, these are powers that can be abused. We’re living in a period of spectacular abuse of power.”
Yet Democrats saw a silver lining in Mr. Comer’s move, which they said had given them new leeway to target President Trump and his family members down the line once the Democrats regain power in Congress and Mr. Trump is no longer in office.
“There’s no question that Oversight Democrats will want to speak to Donald Trump and others,” Representative Robert Garcia of California, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “That is a precedent that has now been set by Comer and House Republicans. If you watch President Trump’s remarks, it’s pretty clear he understands that.”
On Tuesday night in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump did not crow about the Clintons’ predicament, nor did he acknowledge that when it comes to Mrs. Clinton, he for years encouraged his crowds to call to “lock her up.” Instead, he expressed concern.
“I think it’s a shame, to be honest,” Mr. Trump told reporters of the Clintons’ being forced to testify. “I always liked him. Her? Yeah, she’s a very capable woman.”
He added, “I hate to see it, in many ways. I hate to see it, but then look at me — they went after me.”
Mr. Trump has been fairly transparent for months about what he thinks about the Epstein saga. And the spectacle of the Clintons appearing on Capitol Hill in an ongoing inquiry into Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019, only keeps alive a story that the president has long made clear he wants to move on from.
But for years, he has directed Republicans to target his political enemies, and to only investigate Democrats. In dangling the threat of criminal charges against the Clintons to secure their cooperation, Mr. Comer has followed through. His main investigations have targeted two of the last three Democratic presidents, and three of the last Democratic presidential nominees.
It was Mr. Comer who summoned Hunter Biden to testify in a House impeachment inquiry against his father, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But pushing his case against the Clintons to the point where they capitulated to all of his demands put Mr. Comer in uncharted territory. And it’s not clear that it is where he or Mr. Trump necessarily planned to end up.
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Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, at the Capitol on Tuesday, had been trying for months to get Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
When a friend messaged me two days ago about Clawdbot—a new open-source AI agent that has since been renamed OpenClaw—I expected yet another disappointing “assistant.” But it was already a viral sensation, with social media testimonies calling it “AI with hands” because it actually interacts with your files and software.
OpenClaw is free and lives locally on your device. Many users are installing it on Mac mini computers that they leave on 24/7. Paired with OpenClaw’s lobster logo, viral meme threads about the bot resemble the fused feeds of an Apple vendor and a seafood restaurant.
When I set up OpenClaw, it asked for a name, a personality (such as “AI,” “robot,” or “ghost in the machine”), and a vibe (such as “sharp,” “warm,” “chaotic,” or “calm”). I picked “Cy,” “AI assistant,” and “sharp and efficient.” I chose Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI model, as its brain (ChatGPT is also an option). I then connected Cy to WhatsApp and Telegram so my new assistant and I could communicate.
My online life is already streamlined, and I had no pressing needs for Cy, so I called my friend who got me into this. He was sitting in a sauna he’d installed under his stairs, texting with his OpenClaw, “Samantha.” The assistant was generating an audiobook for him. He advised me to ask Cy for help anytime a task came up.
Later, I needed voice memos transcribed and forwarded them to Cy. The assistant downloaded transcription software from GitHub, installed it, and promptly did the transcriptions, saving them to a document on my desktop. I then instructed it to keep one of my coding projects running and to send me updates in audio messages that I could listen to while cooking. Each time it did, I replied with voice messages—no typing required. Then I asked it to call me to chat about projects. I told it to set up the software it would need to make calls and ring me when it was ready; then I went back to finishing this article.
To be clear, OpenClaw isn’t a new AI model. It’s open-source software that uses a preexisting AI model as its brain. OpenClaw gives that model so-called hands (or claws) so it can run commands and manipulate files. It also remembers what you’ve previously worked on and how you prefer to receive information.
Whereas a chatbot tells you what to do, OpenClaw does it. Unlike Siri and Alexa, which chirp about weather, music, and timers and only execute specific commands, OpenClaw follows almost any order like a well-paid mercenary. Send it a goal, and it will break the objective into steps, find tools, install them, troubleshoot them, and attempt to solve any obstacles that arise. You know those frustrated hours you spend searching labyrinthine websites or tinkering with stubborn software? OpenClaw takes over, alerting you only if it needs passwords or payment info. (My friend plans to give Samantha a preloaded credit card with a $100 limit as an experiment.)
Behind the lobster is a real person: Peter Steinberger, a longtime developer. He made OpenClaw to answer a simple question he asked on the Insecure Agents podcast: “Why don’t I have an agent that can look over my agents?” His now viral idea appears to successfully do just that. “An open-source AI agent running on my Mac mini server is the most fun and productive experience I’ve had with AI in a while,” wrote Federico Viticci, founder and editor in chief of MacStories, on Mastodon. People are using OpenClaw to send e-mails, summarize inbox contents, manage calendars, and book and check into flights, all from chat apps they already use. If OpenClaw can’t do something, giving it access to better tools often solves the issue.
Clawdbot was already racking up stars on GitHub (the assistant has garnered more than 116,000 as of this week) when Anthropic raised trademark concerns. Because “Clawdbot” was a riff on Claude, Anthropic asked that the former be renamed to avoid confusion. Steinberger leaned into the lobster theme: lobsters molt to grow, so he chose Moltbot. But he didn’t end up liking the name, so a few days later, he changed it again to OpenClaw.
Of course, Silicon Valley has been abuzz with talk about AI agents for years now. “Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons,” wrote Bill Gates in November 2023. But while agents like Claude Code are improving, we have yet to see such easy integration into workflows and daily life at OpenClaw’s scale.
But before you rush to install OpenClaw, consider the risks. Experts have warned that OpenClaw can expose sensitive information and bypass security boundaries. “AI agents tear all of that down by design,” said security specialist Jamieson O’Reilly to the Register. “They need to read your files, access your credentials, execute commands, and interact with external services. The value proposition requires punching holes through every boundary we spent decades building.”
This doesn’t mean you should fear OpenClaw. Just treat it like a new hire: give it minimum permissions, clear rules, and close supervision while trust is being established. You should also be alert to how others might use the assistant. Expect “Nigerian” prince scams to become more interactive and convincing.
As I was finishing this article, my phone rang. It was a Florida number. I answered, and a slightly robotic male voice said, “Hello, this is Cy.”
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The logo of Moltbot, now called OpenClaw, is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Gen-Zers have become the first generation since records began to be less intelligent than their parents, and an expert has uncovered the reason.
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Gen-Zers have become the first generation since records began to be less intelligent than their parents, and an expert has uncovered the reason.
Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher-turned-neuroscientist, revealed that the generation born between 1997 and the early 2010s has been cognitively stunted by their over-reliance on digital technology in school.
Since records have been kept on cognitive development in the late 1800s, Gen Z is now officially the first group to ever score lower than the generation before them, declining in attention, memory, reading, and math skills, problem-solving abilities, and overall IQ.
Horvath told the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that Gen Z intelligence dropped despite these teenagers and young adults spending more time in school than children did in the 20th century.
The cause, Horvath claimed, is directly tied to the increase in the amount of learning that is now carried out using what he called ‘educational technology’ or EdTech, which includes computers and tablets.
The neuroscientist explained that this generation has fallen behind because the human brain was never wired to learn from short clips seen online and reading brief sentences that sum up much larger books and complex ideas.
‘More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,’ Horvath told the New York Post.
‘Humans are biologically programmed to learn from other humans and from deep study, not flipping through screens for bullet point summaries.’
Gen Z, born approximately between 1997 and 2010, grew up during the age when digital devices were widely distributed in schools worldwide (stock image)
Horvath and other experts speaking to Congress explained that humans evolved to learn best through real human interaction, meaning face-to-face with teachers and peers, not from screens.
He added that screens disrupt the natural biological processes that build deep understanding, memory, and focus.
It is not about poor implementation, inadequate training, or the need for better apps in schools. Scientists said the technology itself was mismatched with how our brains naturally work, grow, and retain information.
Horvath, the director of LME Global, a group that shares brain and behavioral research with businesses and schools, said that data clearly show that cognitive abilities began to plateau and even decline around 2010.
The expert told senators that schools in general hadn’t changed much that year, and that human biology evolves too slowly for it to have been the reason.
‘The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning,’ Horvath told lawmakers on January 15.
‘If you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly.’
He added that the US wasn’t the only country affected by digital cognitive decline, noting that his research covered 80 countries and showed a six-decade trend of poorer learning outcomes as more tech entered classrooms.
Moreover, kids using computers for just five hours a day specifically for their schoolwork scored noticeably lower than those who rarely or never used tech in class.
In the US, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) uncovered that when states rolled out widespread one-to-one device programs, meaning each student gets their own device, scores often flattened or dropped quickly.
While centuries of data have shown that Gen Z has fallen off the path of constant human development, Horvath claimed that many teens and young adults were unaware of their struggles and were actually proud of their alleged intelligence.
‘Most of these young people are overconfident about how smart they are. The smarter people think they are, the dumber they actually are,’ he told the Post.
He noted that Gen Z has become so comfortable with consuming information outside of class through short, attention-escaping sentences and video clips, on platforms such as TikTok, that many schools have given in and now teach in this same manner.
‘What do kids do on computers? They skim. So rather than determining what do we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That’s not progress, that is surrender,’ Horvath warned.
Education experts at the January hearing recommended imposing delays on giving children smartphones, bringing back flip phones instead for young children when needed, and taking nationwide action to normalize limits on tech in schools.
The group called the issue plaguing Gen Z a ‘societal emergency,’ and urged federal lawmakers to consider models like Scandinavia’s EdTech bans.
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Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (Pictured) revealed during a US Senate hearing that Gen Zers have become the first group in history to have a lower IQ than their parents.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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