Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country
Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.
Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.
Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country
Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.
Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.
Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign
Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.
Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.
Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign
Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.
Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.
Inside the US state department, critics are still attacking a shuttered office established to counter foreign propaganda. Now, some of its work is also being resumed
A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.
Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.
Inside the US state department, critics are still attacking a shuttered office established to counter foreign propaganda. Now, some of its work is also being resumed
A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.
Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.
Exclusive: Research says sector is fixated with young talent, with most women experiencing unconscious bias or sexism
Women working in the arts believe they do not have equal opportunities for roles, especially as they get older, according to a report saying that the industry is fixated with “young and emerging” talent.
Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. More than two-thirds (69%) felt that age negatively affected their career success – a figure that rose to 100% among those working in artistic rather than managerial roles.
Exclusive: Research says sector is fixated with young talent, with most women experiencing unconscious bias or sexism
Women working in the arts believe they do not have equal opportunities for roles, especially as they get older, according to a report saying that the industry is fixated with “young and emerging” talent.
Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. More than two-thirds (69%) felt that age negatively affected their career success – a figure that rose to 100% among those working in artistic rather than managerial roles.
У меня в проекте было четырнадцать копий одного IP‑адреса. По одной в каждом скрипте, который ходит на боевой сервер: деплой, перезапуск сервиса, правка DNS, диагностика почты. Классический копипаст, который живёт до первого переезда.
Переезд случился. Адрес поменялся. Четырнадцать скриптов стали указывать в никуда.
As economic circumstances worsen, the PM’s commitments have left him and the chancellor in a tight spot
When Andy Burnham made his first speech after returning as an MP, he promised that as prime minister he would oversee “the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years”. His style, direction and communication has been a big shift from Keir Starmer’s approach, but as he heads into the autumn, the new prime minister faces some very similar problems.
With an early budget in late October, and worsening economic circumstances, Burnham has made promises and commitments that put him in a tight spot. Here are some of the constraints over the coming months that Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, must contend with in their autumn budget.
Planning delays and slow 5G upgrades could leave the UK unable to cope with a surge in AI-related traffic
The UK risks becoming a laggard in the global AI race as crucial telecoms upgrades to harness the technology fall behind rival nations, according to senior industry executives.
Haitian immigrants at a protest in Salisbury, Maryland, on August 26, 2026. | Dominic Gwinn/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
After ending legal protections for 350,000 Haitians living in the United States, the Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to deport them back to a country engulfed in violence — and bragging about it.
“Those with terminated TPS are in our nation Illegally,” the Department of Homeland Security X account posted on Thursday evening, alongside a video of chained Haitian immigrants set to cheery music. “They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.”
Temporary protected status (TPS) is extended to immigrants for whom conflict, natural disaster, or another catastrophe means returning home would be unsafe, and Haiti certainly qualifies: The island nation has been in crisis since its president was assassinated in 2021, with armed gangs controlling most of the capital city; earlier this week, dozens were killed and kidnapped near the capital.
Despite all that, the administration first attempted to end TPS protections for Haitians living in the US last year, and succeeded after the Supreme Court gave its blessing in June.
Now, it’s sending them back to a country where the State Department warns Americans not to travel “for any reason” because of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.” On Thursday, that effort included a deportation flight carrying families with young children born in the US.
Haitian immigrants in the US aren’t the only people whom Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is targeting more aggressively. According to immigration data released this week by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, ICE arrested a record number of people in two consecutive months this summer: first 43,000 in June, then nearly 50,000 last month.
As arrests surge, who’s being targeted is changing, too. More and more ICE arrestees don’t have a criminal record; in July, immigrants with only civil immigration violations made up a majority of arrests. Often, they also have active immigration cases pursuing asylum, a green card, or some other legal status, as the Seattle Times reported this week.
Overall, ICE detentions are also rising again, though they’re still lower than they were at the start of the year.
The pace of arrests reflects ICE’s growing size — 29,000 employees in June, according to the New York Times, compared to 21,000 in January 2025 — as well as its glut of cash after Trump’s reconciliation bill forked over $75 billion to the agency last year.
Nonetheless, the agency still wants more: As the New York Times reported in July, its internal target for arrests is 2,000 per day. That would mean a record of at least 60,000 people per month, the majority likely guilty of no crime at all.
One link for later
➨ Shop local. With food getting recalled left and right for all kinds of dire reasons (both related to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and not), farmers markets are getting more attention as an option for leafy greens that won’t leave you in crisis. But how do small farms pull it off, and how much of a difference does it make? The Vox video team headed to Camarillo, California, to investigate.
Before you go…
Did you know…that three words might be all that’s standing between us and autonomous killer robots? As my colleague Kylie Jones explains, it’s the semantic difference between “meaningful human control” and “appropriate human judgment,” which is the Pentagon’s current standard.
Today’s trivia: In which athletic conference does Georgia Tech compete? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which city serves as the headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. That would be Indianapolis.
Homes being rebuilt in Altadena. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
A natural disaster can do in one day what decades of public zoning fights cannot: Erase entire neighborhoods and force thousands of decisions, all at once, about what will replace them.
That’s the question now — still— hanging over Altadena, the Pacific Palisades, and other Los Angeles-area communities that burned in the catastrophic January 2025 wildfires. More than a year and a half later, rebuilding remains painfullyslow. All this is unfolding in a region already desperately short of homes, with one of the most expensive housing markets in America.
Now, California’s legislature is set to vote on a law bowing to local anti-density pressure that could make that all the worse, and set an ominous precedent for housing affordability. This is, on one level, a regional story about a fire-traumatized community trying to get back on its feet and shape its future, but it reflects something much larger, too. It highlights the kind of zero-sum politics increasingly pervasive nationwide, that casts ordinary homebuilding as something sinister, and that elevates local control above all else. These instincts help explain why it’s become so hard for the US to build the things we need, and why the fight for affordable, abundant housing remains so fraught, in California and nationwide.
The roots of this dispute go back well before the fires. For the better part of a decade, California has been trying to solve one of the central contradictions driving our national housing shortage: Almost everyone agrees that the country needs more homes, yet almost everyone has a reason they should go somewhere else. The state has passed laws weakening exclusionary zoning, legalizing denser “missing middle” housing, and taking some housing decisions out of the hands of local governments that refuse to permit enough homes.
That push included, in 2021, a now-famous statewide law, Senate Bill 9, which overrode local zoning to enable homeowners statewide to build up to four housing units on their lots. Another pair of laws, SB 684 and a subsequent expansion, SB 1123, made it possible to subdivide vacant lots zoned for single-family houses and build up to 10 smaller homes on them.
The 2025 fires are now testing California’s pro-housing progress. In Altadena, an unincorporated suburb about 14 miles north of downtown LA, the Eaton Fire destroyed a huge share of homes. Many survivors are now rebuilding the single-family homes they lost in the disaster. Others, facing meager insurance payouts and massive construction costs, have sought to rebuild at higher densities to make doing so financially feasible, or sold their lots to developers and moved elsewhere.
Only a small share of rebuilding applications so far have relied on SB 9 or SB 1123, but a revolt has nevertheless ensued among opponents of denser developments. Lawmakers in Sacramento now want to stop the use of one of California’s pro-housing laws in the community. By August 31, the state legislature could pass yet a new law: SB 1090, which would suspend SB 1123 in Altadena until 2030, blocking the additional housing it would have allowed.
Altadena is by all accounts idyllic, lined with storybook bungalows bordering the San Gabriel Mountains. The impulse to want it to be built back as it was before is only human and understandable. Neil Tyler, a fire survivor who supports SB 1090 and is currently rebuilding his home, told me that many in the community are deeply anxious and angry that a developer could buy burned lots and transform them into clusters of 10 homes that would feel alien to the Altadena they’re trying to recover. It “exploded into the community’s fear and opposition and pretty much outrage over someone trying to profit off the backs of all of our pain and suffering,” he said.
I’ve writtenextensivelyon the national housing shortage and the local zoning laws that help cause it. Altadena offers an unusually sympathetic case for the desire to maintain hyper-local control — it’s terribly unfair for your community to burn down overnight. And it challenged me to think more deeply about what is owed to a community suffering such incredible loss.
Ultimately, the fight over SB 1090 clarified to me more strongly why the local level is the wrong one to make decisions about housing supply, and why it’s important for California’s hard-won housing laws, along with similar state laws elsewhere in the US, to withstand the very local resistance they were enacted to overcome. The metro LA area, including Altadena, is extraordinarily expensive in large part because local control has already caused it to underbuild housing for decades. SB 1090 would convert some fire survivors’ desire to preserve Altadena’s low-density form into restrictions on other people’s rights and choices, while blocking homes the region desperately needs.
The case for rebuilding…more
Debates over arcane laws with names like SB 9, SB 1123, and SB 1090 might sound abstract, impenetrable, and boring. But the principles are fairly straightforward, and they explain a lot about what feels so wrong with American life right now.
The economics of housing is not so different from that of any other good: When lots of people want a thing but we don’t make enough of it, it will become ever more expensive. This has happened in LA and many other parts of the US over the last century. Starting in the 1960s, LA used local zoning laws to sharply decrease allowed densities for new housing in the city. By 1990, the city’s theoretical population capacity had fallen from roughly 10 million to about 4 million, even as its economy and demand to live there grew. Sure enough, LA’s population today is just south of 4 million, and housing costs are predictably out of control.
Those numbers are just LA proper — but housing markets are regional, and LA’s suburbs have been just as responsible for the area’s chronic housing scarcity. One of the most pervasive drivers is single-family zoning, a form of “exclusionary zoning” that makes it illegal to build anything other than a single-family house on most residential land in the US.
Altadena, where the median home is valued at around $1.12 million, is zoned overwhelmingly for single-family dwellings — a policy California has sought to chip away at with state laws like SB 9 and 1123. The idea is that allowing more homes on a single lot will expand supply, which helps lower housing prices; in tandem, it allows physically smaller homes to be built instead of just large single-family houses, which also lowers housing prices.
Reforming exclusionary zoning in this manner also does something that can help fire survivors trying to rebuild their lives. It tends to raise land values, because a parcel that can support several homes is worth more than one where only one can legally be built.
Consider a hypothetical: An empty lot might sell to a builder for $500,000 if it’s only zoned to support a single-family house. The builder might then spend $1 million on construction and other development costs and sell the house for $1.8 million, making $300,000 in profit. If the plot could instead support six smaller homes under SB 1123, the builder could pay $800,000 for the land, spend $3 million on construction, and sell each home for $750,000, making $700,000 in profit. This is a simplified example, and real-world comparisons are much more complicated, but the underlying principle is basic land economics: Increasing a parcel’s development capacity increases what a developer can justify paying for it. Allowing greater densities can be positive-sum — the original homeowner can get a higher price for their sale, the new home buyers can get much less expensive houses, and the builder can make a greater profit.
“These small-scale density tools could in fact be a financial lifeline that allows some Altadena homeowners to fill what is often a six-figure gap in their financing in order to rebuild their home and provide some housing for some other folks,” said Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, one of several California pro-housing groups opposing SB 1090.
Caroline Paules, an Altadena resident who also opposes SB 1090, noted that rebuilding to modern fire-resistant standards is expensive; building densely can help mitigate that cost. Paules is a mechanical engineer and co-founder of a startup that builds small prefabricated cottages, and had hoped to use SB 1123 to build in Altadena, with seven cottages each on lots previously reserved for single-family homes. If SB 1090 passes, she said, she may not be able to. “I completely resonate with the desire for Altadena to be what it was, because it was beautiful and perfect,” she said. But “no matter how traumatizing and painful it is, I think we have to release trying to shove Altadena into what it was before the fire.”
How California’s pro-housing push swerved
Last year, after the fire destroyed between one-third and one-half of Altadena’s homes, the Los Angeles County planning department promoted SB 9 and 1123 as rebuilding options in a brochure for fire survivors. But earlier this year, as neighbors became increasingly concerned about rebuilding plans, LA County abruptly changed course and voided applications filed to build under SB 1123. The county now took the position that the Altadena lots didn’t qualify under SB 1123 because so many surrounding homes had burned that the parcels couldn’t be considered infill projects.
The reversal echoed what happened last summer, when Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass suspended SB 9 in the Palisades after residents had already begun submitting applications — a midstream rule change that made an already grueling rebuild harder. Most of Altadena wasn’t included in that order because much of it isn’t designated as a very-high-fire-hazard zone, so residents who oppose the higher-density developments have sought other routes to block it.
Much of the recent backlash has centered on plans to build under SB 1123 by Stone West Homes, a Southern California-based developer. Between summer 2025 and early 2026, the developer was involved in buying seven Altadena lots where homes had burned, planning to redevelop them into about 10 small houses each — 70 homes total. These were large lots, most of them between two to four times the size of a typical new single-family lot. The developer has said the lots were purchased for more than single-family development could have justified, but opponents have disputed that. (That is a complicated question to adjudicate, and not one I’ll pursue here.)
In March, LA County told the developer its application was being canceled. “They basically flipped a switch,” Chris Manasserian, a lawyer for the developer, told me; they then sued LA County for what they allege was an illegal reversal.
The fight soon moved to the state’s capital. By June, California state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, whose district includes Altadena, rewrote an existing bill, SB 1090, to include a moratorium on SB 9 and SB 1123 in the community, setting this whole episode into motion.
The LA County planning department did not respond to a request for comment. Pérez did not make herself available for an interview. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena and has vigorously promoted SB 1090, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview.
The SB 9 suspension was eventually dropped from the bill, leaving only the moratorium on SB 1123, which would take effect only for applications submitted after October 1 of this year. To some residents, 1123 is much more threatening: It allows greater densities, and it’s more likely to be used by outside developers than pre-existing Altadena homeowners. Suspicion of developers has been central to the campaign for SB 1090. A website run by SB 1090 supporters portrays Stone West’s planned developments as “disaster capitalism” by “out-of-town speculators.”
I find this hard to compute. It feels of a piece with a broader, slopulist zero-sum turn in American politics that treats any transaction in which someone profits as evidence of an injustice. Developers, for all the suspicion attached to the word, are people who build things, including homes — if we want homes, we need them. “It seems like we’ve just been demonized for something that makes perfect sense to do,” Manasserian said. Developers can just as well buy Altadena lots to build large single-family homes, but I haven’t seen the same anti-developer sentiment leveled against that possibility.
I asked Neil Tyler what exactly makes the prospect of living near an SB 1123 development similar to what’s proposed by Stone West, with 10 houses on it instead of one, so threatening. He mentioned one cul-de-sac street where, he said, most homeowners had previously planned to rebuild, but many were now considering selling rather than living near an SB 1123 development. Summarizing their thinking, Tyler said: “I can’t pour my time and money and resources that are so stretched to now build my home back at this property, where all of a sudden right next to me could be a townhome that blocks my kind of way of life that I just want to recapture.” (The street that he’s referring to is lined with single-family homes on very large, low-density lots.)
As a result, he said, SB 1123 in Altadena “is very directly further displacing people that intended to come back.” He believes it’s wrong for an outside developer to take advantage of the law to abruptly alter neighborhoods while residents are still trying to make decisions about returning. But he emphasized that he and others who share his views don’t oppose all density increases or deny that there’s a housing shortage. He supports accessory dwelling units (ADUs), for example, which California has legalized statewide and which he and other fire survivors are now building on their properties. He also raised concerns about local infrastructure capacity and fire spread and evacuation, part of which I examine below, but worth noting here is that SB 1123 does not waive ordinary utility requirements. Infrastructure, particularly in a place like America’s second-largest metro area, can grow to accommodate more people; it’s not a fixed limit on density.
Local control clashes with regional needs
So far, only a very small share of the nearly 7,000 homes that burned in Altadena have been put up for 1123 redevelopment. Although the level of density they represent is higher than what’s typical on an Altadena residential street, they’re hardly high-density by metropolitan standards, especially in such a high-demand area. “We’re not talking about allowing six- or eight- or 10-story apartment buildings,” Khanmalek said.
As with other housing fights across the country, the development opponents are highly vocal, but it’s far from clear that their views are unanimous. “I have yet to see someone draw a connection between what developers are intending to do and it actively harming an Altadenan,” said Paules.
It may be true that some neighbors would not like to live near denser developments, and it understandably feels unfair for a wildfire to be the occasion that accelerates that change. But it’s also unfair to deprive fire survivors of property rights, and it’s unfair that communities in metro LA have long banned (and continue to ban) denser housing and fueled a housing shortage in the first place. Many residents want to protect the ability to occupy a very desirable part of the city at low density — the emotional impact of losing that can be very real, but it’s not something residents are owed in perpetuity.
Neighbors disliking the presence of new development is the universally cited reason for opposing building, and opponents can always find a reason that a particular time and place is the wrong one in which to build. The perceived costs of new housing are concentrated among nearby residents, while the costs of blocking it are borne by society as a whole. That asymmetry is why the right to build housing cannot depend on securing neighbors’ discretionary approval.
How does fire risk factor into this?
Altadena is self-evidently in a fire-prone area, a danger that climate change will likely continue to intensify. Might there be a legitimate argument for no longer building in places like it, or at least not concentrating more people there?
Two Southern California wildfire experts — Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute, and Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with University of California Cooperative Extension — told me that the question is very complicated. Density has a complex relationship with fire risk, and it can cut in opposite directions.
On a macro level, building more densely in already established communities (like Altadena) is preferable to pushing development even farther out into the wildland-urban interface. “Creating more residential units in existing suburban areas should be a goal,” according to a report from the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources division, co-authored by Moritz. Once a fire is already burning through a community, closely spaced buildings can accelerate structure-to-structure spread and expose more people. But lower-density lots with a lot of vegetation can also fuel a conflagration.
“I would be reluctant to assume that allowing subdivision [of lots under SB 1123] necessarily increases wildfire risk,” Syphard wrote in an email. She listed improved fire resistance in homes, vegetation mitigation, and close attention to evacuation routes as better ways to reduce risk “than a blanket restriction based on the number of units permitted on an already-developed parcel.”
SB 1123 already does not apply in very-high-fire-hazard areas, and the law allows local governments to reject a proposed development if it makes an evidence-based finding that it would pose a threat to public health or safety.
Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for California YIMBY, told me that his organization suspects SB 1090’s supporters want the three-year moratorium to eventually be made permanent. Though the bill’s supporters maintain that their circumstances are extraordinary, Gray and Khanmalek both fear it would create a precedent for more communities to seek exemptions from SB 1123.
No growing, economically successful city can refuse to densify forever without ruinous implications for housing affordability that will eventually undermine its economy. California’s Gov. Newsom has generally stood firm against local governments seeking to defy state housing laws, but last year’s wildfires have tested that resolve. His office declined to comment on SB 1090, citing its general practice of not commenting on pending legislation. Should the bill reach his desk — which could happen as soon as next week if it passes the state legislature as many expect — the question will be whether he’s willing to supply the leadership that local officials have not.
Southern California is already one of America’s most beautiful, sought-after places to live, and freed from its chronic housing scarcity, it could be better still: less punishingly expensive, and more capable of welcoming all those drawn to it. The fires have already taken enough from the region; they ought not be allowed to scorch the housing reforms that had begun to open up a more abundant future.
Moscow recruits an estimated 1,000 people a day but western officials say it cannot keep up with casualty level
Russia is losing about 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit, western officials have said.
While Russia is still acquiring new battlefield recruits at speed, with an estimated rate of 1,000 a day, in the last two months even this has not been sufficient to replace those killed or injured.
Critics call move to gain long-term access to country’s massive energy reserves ‘predatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’
Reports that the US is preparing to claim a big stake in Venezuela’s massive energy reserves have sparked an outcry, with critics describing the move as “predatory” and a “rapacious” land grab.
Several media outlets this week reported that the Trump administration – which abducted Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, in January and has steered the South American country ever since – hopes to secure long-term access to its oil and gasfields.
However, Kevin Warsh didn’t say if interest rates would change in coming months, as inflation remains stubborn
The US Federal Reserve is not done fighting high inflation, its chair, Kevin Warsh, said in his first major speech in the role on Friday, emphasizing that it was “the Fed’s job to deliver stable prices”.
Warsh did not indicate where the Fed will take interest rates in the coming months, despite US inflation remaining stubbornly above the central bank’s 2% target amid the war in Iran. But his speech was taken by markets as a signal that rates may rise in the coming months, a move that may put him at odds with Donald Trump, who has aggressively called for rates to be cut.
Brazil has failed to prove compliance with EU rules on use of antibiotics in cattle and poultry farming
The UK’s leading farming organisations and animal health experts have called for an urgent ban on imports of Brazilian meat, in light of concerns over the safety of imports.
The National Farmers’ Union in England and its sister organisations in the devolved administrations wrote to the government on Friday warning that public health was at risk.
A federal judge ruled the Trump administration illegally labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk, handing the AI company a victory as its second Pentagon lawsuit continues in Washington.
“The big question is: What is going to be put forward as an alternative and how palatable will that be to consumers, lawmakers, the healthcare industry?” KFF Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby tells Vox’s Today, Explained. | Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Health insurance enrollment through the Affordable Care Act is plummeting.
Nearly 3 million fewer Americans now have insurance through the program, popularly known as Obamacare, compared to last year, according to federal data released in June. After congressional Republicans allowed enhanced subsidies for the program to expire in January, many Americans saw their health insurance premiums spike by an average of about 30 percent.
As a result, many Americans have been forced to drop their coverage entirely.
With affordability among the top concerns on voters’ minds heading into the midterms, healthcare costs have become a central issue for candidates.
“A lot of policy experts say, look, when you raise the price of something, demand goes down. And that’s what’s happening here,” KFF Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby told Today, Explained. “It’s the prices — people are dropping out.”
Appleby has been reporting on healthcare policy for decades, and she joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down the latest changes to the Affordable Care Act, why enrollment is plummeting, and how the ACA crisis is teeing up healthcare as a central issue in the upcoming midterms.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Sixteen years ago, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Julie, what was the situation at the time that made it feel so necessary? What did the Affordable Care Act aim to do?
There was a lot going on. We had a lot of people who were uninsured. We had premiums going up. Many times in the past there had been some effort to do some kind of health reform, but nothing ever really passed. We had Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s, but no major legislation since then.
People had employer coverage, like they do now, but there were a lot of people who were on their own and buying in what’s called the individual market.
The individual market was really tough. They could tell people, “Hey, you’ve got a health condition, we’re not taking you.” They could you could sign up for an individual plan and later, if you did get some kind of health condition, they could go back through your medical records and see, “Hey, did they tell us about every single thing that had happened to them in the past five or ten years?” And if not, they could retroactively cancel your plan.
What did the Affordable Care Act do exactly?
It allowed young people to stay on their parents’ insurance plan up to age 26, and that was a really big deal and also a very popular provision in the Affordable Care Act.
It created these subsidies to help people purchase coverage on the individual market. It pays for part of your premium. After you pay a certain percentage of your household income, the subsidies kick in and it picks up the rest, up to a certain up to a certain income level.
“They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.”
It did some other things, like they can’t tell you, “You have a preexisting condition, so we’re not going to take you.” They’ve got to take you.
It created a benefit package that covers all these essential things like hospitalization and drug costs and maternity care, which might not have been in plans before. They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.
What was the conversation around passing the Affordable Care Act? Remind us how and why it got so toxic and pitched.
It was super polarized, kind of like what we have now. There was a lot of discussion around whether this is going to be too much government or if it was just the right amount. A lot of people thought, “No, this is terrible, it’s gonna destroy things.”
And I think polls reflected that for the first four or five years or more of the Affordable Care Act. It was pretty evenly divided, when you looked at opinion polls, between people who thought it was a good thing and people who didn’t think it was a good thing.
In more recent years, that has changed and the favorability ratings have gone up for the Affordable Care Act and now majorities do favor the Affordable Care Act.
If you had told me that 16 years ago, I would not have believed you. Here we are. And how is the Affordable Care Act doing?
To use medical terminology, is it on life support? No, it’s actually doing fairly well. But there are some symptoms that there are problems.
Remember at the end of last year, there was all the discussion about these things called enhanced premium tax credits and whether they were going to be extended or not. The government shut down over this. Those were not extended. As a result, it costs more this year for most people in the plan, and what we’ve seen is during open enrollment last year we had about a million people fewer sign up and that was about a five percent drop.
That was 5 percent just in signups at the end of last year. Since then, the first few months of the year, we’ve seen about 3 million people drop off. Some people are finding that they can’t afford it and they are not paying their bills and they are getting dropped. A 3-million-person drop-off is pretty substantial.
There’s also a group of folks, particularly conservatives and Republicans, who say, “You know what, the numbers were inflated.” There was all this improper enrollment. People were getting these zero-premium plans and so there was fraud, there was improper enrollment, the subsidies were too generous or there were other factors that led to some fraudulent activity. And so these drop-offs just represent people who were fraudulently enrolled dropping out for one reason or another.
There’s this real split right now between what are the reasons for the drop off. But most policy folks, most people who study the situation here say the main reason is people just aren’t able to afford it.
Why is it so expensive? Why are healthcare costs so high?
That’s the $64,000 question, right?
And if you get it right, you win. You’re in charge.
That’s been the question since I’ve been covering this debate. Look, it’s not just Affordable Care Act costs going up. Employer plans are going up. Everything’s going up.
Generally, healthcare costs go up faster than inflation and that’s driven by a lot of things. It’s driven by drug costs, it’s driven by hospital costs, it’s driven by labor costs. So all of those things go into the mix with the Affordable Care Act. But also this year, there’s this additional factor of the subsidies that went away.
Insurers were looking at that saying, “You know what, the subsidies are going down. We expect to have lower enrollments next year. The people most likely to stay enrolled are the ones who have health problems because they don’t want to take the risk of being uninsured.” So insurers were calculating that in when they set their premium rates for this year: We might have sicker people in our pool that we’re gonna have to cover.
That’s part of what we’ve seen with costs in the Affordable Care Act. But everybody is seeing health inflation go up right now and that’s affecting premiums.
Here we are 16 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Has it accomplished what it set out to do?
You have to look at that in a number of ways. It aimed to expand coverage and reduce the uninsured. I think the answer there is yes, the number of uninsured has gone from 13 or 14 percent to as low as just under 8 percent a couple of years ago. It’s ticked up a little bit since then.
Did it control costs? That’s a harder one to answer. And it’s back to that $64,000 question. How do you do that? Costs have continued to go up. Premiums are definitely higher than they were pre-ACA. To be fair, the plans are very different. They cover more, they’re more generous, they’re better coverage, but they are more expensive.
The big question is: What is going to be put forward as an alternative and how palatable will that be to consumers, lawmakers, the healthcare industry? It’s going to be challenging, but I think we’re going to hear a lot more discussion this year. Whether or not we see actual proposals that could pass, I think that’s a little more questionable.
From the first US and Israeli strikes six months ago to the battle for Hormuz, this timeline plots how Trump’s war on Iran quickly became a regional conflict with global economic consequences
On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel began large-scale strikes on Iran. Tehran responded by attacking Israeli and US allies across the Gulf.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of strikes, and the strait of Hormuz – a crucial waterway for transporting oil – was effectively closed soon after. The conflict quickly became a regional war with global economic consequences.
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