We Won't Miss Her - Karoline Leavitt Is Leaving the White House
Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House at the end of August, and we won't miss her. The 28-year-old was the youngest press secretary ever to hold the job, but being young never meant being restrained in her case. Leavitt came in to defend Donald Trump, and she did it with a level of aggression where facts regularly took a back seat to the political assignment. Now she is drawing her own conclusion and says she wants to spend more time with her family. After the birth of her daughter Viviana in May, she had only recently returned to the White House podium. She also has a two-year-old son. Since returning, Leavitt wrote, she had felt that she could not be both the mother her two young children deserved and devote the time and energy the job demanded. She called her departure a bittersweet decision. Donald Trump said he fully understood and respected the move. Leavitt will not disappear from his orbit entirely, however. Trump has already announced that she will become one of his top outside advisers and remain an influential voice inside the Republican Party. Her assignment is simply changing, because Trump intends to keep using her in the fight over the midterm elections.
Anyone familiar with Leavitt's right-wing populist political career will hardly be surprised. Before joining Trump's 2024 campaign, she worked as a spokesperson for the pro-Trump political action committee MAGA Inc. Back in 2022, she tried to win a seat in Congress from New Hampshire, won a Republican primary against nine other candidates, and then lost to Democrat Chris Pappas. During Trump's first term, she had already worked in the White House press office, and later became communications director for Republican Representative Elise Stefanik. As press secretary, Leavitt held fewer press conferences than some of her predecessors. Trump himself talks constantly with reporters anyway, while Leavitt was often sent to Fox News and other conservative outlets. There, she was expected to sell the president's policies and go after Democrats and established media. In that sense, she was very much part of a tradition, because Trump's first term had already produced Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany. Grisham somehow made it through her entire time in office without holding a single press briefing. McEnany, by contrast, regularly used the podium to attack journalists. Leavitt continued that approach and became one of Trump's most aggressive public defenders. At the end of the month, that ends, at least inside the White House. Politically, she remains with Trump. Only the podium will belong to someone else.
Millions of Years of Climate History in Penguin Bones - Researchers Read Antarctica Through Fossils
Fossilized penguin bones from Antarctica have given researchers an unusually precise trace of earlier climate changes. Geologists at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing examined the bones with an X-ray microanalyzer and found that titanium levels in particular changed along with temperature trends on Earth. The study appeared in the journal Fossil Record. Five penguins were examined, three fossils from Seymour Island off the Antarctic Peninsula and, for comparison, a modern chinstrap penguin and an emperor penguin. The fossilized bones came from Chinese-Chilean expeditions in 2020 and 2024 and cover three periods of the Eocene between 55.3 and 37.7 million years ago. Seymour Island is one of the places where especially large numbers of fossilized penguins have been found, and at the same time its marine sediments have preserved climate changes stretching across millions of years. The bones did not have to be damaged for the analysis.
The researchers scanned their surfaces at intervals of 50 micrometers and, after more than 18 hours of measurements, produced maps for eleven chemical elements, including calcium, phosphorus, iron, titanium, silicon, and sulfur. Titanium stood out in particular. In the oldest bone, dated to between 55.3 and 54.1 million years ago, the signal was about twice as strong as in the two younger fossils and clearly stronger than in modern penguins. Titanium barely dissolves in water and therefore moves very little, which is why geologists can use it to determine how much weathered rock was carried from land into the sea. In this case, a lot of titanium means that rock on land was breaking down heavily and was then washed into coastal waters. That fits exactly with the climate of the early Eocene, when Earth went through one of its warmest periods of the past 66 million years and Antarctica itself was warm and wet. High temperatures and heavy rainfall accelerated chemical weathering, while the material entered the sea and was deposited there, including on the bones. As the climate later cooled, weathering weakened, and the titanium content in the younger fossils fell with it. But the bones tell even more. Iron and manganese appeared in uneven patches, indicating that groundwater around the bones repeatedly contained different amounts of oxygen after burial. In one fossil, sulfur-rich and iron-rich areas overlapped, pointing to bacteria that converted sulfates into sulfides. The authors describe their work as the first to track such chemical changes through an entire sediment layer directly in vertebrate bones. Fossils from high latitudes could therefore be much more than remains of extinct animals, they could show very precisely how polar environments respond to extreme warming.
ICE Is Making Arrests at Airports - Even Legal Travelers No Longer Know If They're Safe
ICE has sharply expanded arrests at airports in recent weeks, and now even people with ongoing legal immigration cases no longer know whether they can board a domestic flight without being picked up. The agency says it is targeting people with expired visas, but that description leaves out a crucial part of the story. Under U.S. immigration law, a visa can expire even though the person involved is explicitly allowed, or even required, by the government to remain in the country because an application is still pending. Someone who entered legally on a tourist or student visa, later marries a U.S. citizen, and applies for permanent residency cannot simply leave the country while the case is being processed, because doing so can be treated as abandoning the application. Processing often takes one to two years or longer, while the original visa expires in the meantime. Even so, the person's continued stay remains authorized.
That is exactly where the contradiction lies: people can be lawfully present in the country and still be arrested and placed into deportation proceedings. Many of the airport cases reported so far apparently involve people whose applications were still pending and who had not previously been in active removal proceedings. Then there are people in ongoing asylum cases, people challenging the termination of their status, or holders of conditional green cards whose renewals are still being processed. They are all following the legal procedures, and yet ICE still does not say publicly who can expect to be arrested at an airport. That lack of openness is already changing behavior. One man had applied for a green card after marrying a U.S. citizen. His tourist visa expired while the case was pending, and his permanent residency was later approved. Even so, he postponed a planned trip to a wedding inside the United States until he physically had the green card in his hand. There is no reason to arrest someone who is already a permanent resident, yet even green-card holders have been targeted in individual cases. There is another problem as well: the databases used by ICE and Customs and Border Protection are not always current or accurate and in some cases lag as much as two years behind. We run into this problem in court all the time.
Someone who is legally in the country may be able to prove that status later, but by then the flight has been missed and detention has already happened. Compared with the millions of people who fly domestically every day, the number of known arrests is still small. That is more than enough to have an effect. If even someone with explicit government permission cannot be sure that a flight will not end in handcuffs, they think twice before traveling. The goal of the administration is to create fear, panic, and confusion, tied to a broader hostility toward noncitizens that is now reaching citizens as well.
$150 Million, Almost No Experience, and Now a Withdrawal - Trump's Law Firm Backs Out of Migrant Children Contract
A small Texas law firm with ties to the Trump administration was supposed to receive a $150 million federal contract to represent unaccompanied migrant children in court, and now Burke Law Group has backed out. The administration had announced only last week that it planned to award the contract to the Houston firm, even though it has very little experience in immigration law. Right after the announcement, lawsuits were being prepared, and all of us were already standing by. Now the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement says Burke decided not to apply and will not receive the funding. The agency did not say why the firm pulled out. Burke itself said only that it had considered applying for a "small portion" of the contract. It did not explain why that plan was dropped either. The problem behind this is much bigger than one failed contract, because at the end of July the Trump administration allowed a contract with nearly 100 organizations that had represented migrant children across the country to expire. There is still no permanent replacement.
For now, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants is stepping in under a $20 million contract that runs through the end of December. What happens after that to the thousands of children caught in deportation proceedings remains unclear. About 1,800 children were most recently living in government shelters, while another roughly 22,000 facing deportation were staying with relatives or other sponsors. The law requires the government to provide legal representation to unaccompanied minors in these proceedings. Burke was supposed to take on exactly that work, even though the firm has fewer than 30 lawyers and, according to its own website, only two attorneys with relevant immigration-law experience. Founder Marcella Burke worked as a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department during Trump's first term. The team also includes Justin Shubow, a supporter of Trump's push for classical and traditional architecture in federal buildings, as well as conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro. The temporary replacement through USCRI is creating problems of its own. Its lawyers showed up unannounced in immigration courts last week and said they represented children they had never even met.
Judges, journalists supporting the cases, and lawyers from the previous organizations sometimes did not know who was actually responsible. The old providers are still working even though their contracts have expired because they have legal and professional obligations to the children. Some of those organizations had to sue the government after payments had been withheld since last year. On August 6, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in California ordered the federal government to make the outstanding payments to the organizations. Six of the nine unpaid months have now been covered, with the rest still being processed. Caelin Moriarity Miltko, the lawyer representing the legal aid organizations from the previous program administered by the Acacia Center for Justice, told the court that these half-baked temporary arrangements were not enough to comply with the judge's order. Representation cannot simply be transferred from one organization to another overnight just because the government changes a contract.
That is exactly where the system stands now: the old structure was shut down, the planned $150 million replacement has backed out, the temporary arrangement lasts only through December, and thousands of children still do not know who will represent them in court after that. For these reasons, people had already gone back to the courts yesterday and again today in an effort to secure permanent protection for the children.
To be continued ...
Russia's Economy Is Growing Again - But the Jump Comes With Expensive Oil and Heavy Government Spending
Russia's economy grew by a surprising 1.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026 compared with a year earlier, stronger than both the central bank and the Economy Ministry had expected. Rosstat released the preliminary figures on Wednesday after the economy had still contracted by 0.2 percent year over year in the first quarter. The central bank had expected only 0.8 percent growth in the second quarter, while the Economy Ministry had forecast 0.9 percent. After the new figures were released, the ministry raised its estimate for growth in the first half of the year from 0.3 to 0.6 percent. That is not especially strong, particularly since Russia reported growth of 1 percent in 2025 and as much as 4.9 percent in 2024. For all of 2026, the central bank still expects growth of no more than 1 percent.
The stronger second-quarter performance had already shown up in monthly figures. Part of the increase simply came from the fact that there were more working days between April and June 2026 than during the same period a year earlier. Higher government spending and expensive oil also helped, two factors that continue to support the Russian economy. At the same time, Rosstat reported a 0.06 percent decline in consumer prices for the week of August 4 through August 10. The official annual inflation rate stood at 6.05 percent as of August 10, while prices have risen 4.69 percent since the start of the year, according to government figures. The central bank still expects full-year inflation of between 6 and 7 percent. The key interest rate has stood at 14 percent since the end of July, a level that continues to show how much pressure remains on prices and financing. The second quarter looks better than the start of the year, but it is hard to call this a strong recovery. Russia's economy is growing again, but a significant part of that growth still depends on government spending and high oil revenues.
Iran and the U.S. Are Getting Nowhere - Even the 60 Days Are Now in Question
Iran and the United States remain stuck in their efforts to revive the interim agreement reached in June, and Tehran is now saying flatly that there has been absolutely no progress. A senior Iranian official said mediators are discussing whether Washington might return to the agreement and whether a timetable could be set for both sides to carry out their commitments, but so far they have gotten nowhere. The June agreement called for an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts, but it lasted only a short time.
Donald Trump declared it over on July 7, and a week later Iran's Foreign Ministry said the agreement had been suspended. Both sides have since accused each other of violating major commitments. Washington demands that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while Tehran accuses the United States of failing to lift the blockade of Iranian ports and release frozen Iranian assets as promised. Trump nevertheless claimed on Wednesday that the United States had total control over the Strait of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority set up by Iran contradicted him and said the waterway would remain closed until Iran's conditions were accepted. Trump then went after Iran again on Truth Social, saying the country was all talk and no action and was no longer the former "Bully of the Middle East." Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly gone back and forth between new threats and claims that a peace deal was just around the corner. Since U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began on February 28, thousands of people have been killed, mainly in Iran and Lebanon. Iran, in turn, has attacked U.S. facilities and infrastructure in Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. The June interim agreement originally provided for a 60-day period during which both sides were supposed to reach a final deal on Iran's nuclear program and the lifting of U.S. sanctions.
Tehran is now challenging those 60 days altogether. The Iranian official rejected a report by Turkey's Anadolu news agency saying Pakistan believed the period would be extended. From Iran's point of view, the clock never started because the United States violated the agreement just 48 hours after it was reached and walked away from it a few days later. Therefore, Tehran says, there is nothing to extend. At the same time, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, even though before the war roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas traffic passed through it. New attacks on shipping on Tuesday rattled markets again. Since the war began, Brent crude had at one point climbed to $126 a barrel, around 75 percent above its prewar level. On Wednesday, Brent was back at roughly $88, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate was trading around $83. There is still little sign of any return to the agreement, and Washington and Tehran no longer even agree on whether the agreed timetable ever began at all.
