The Pentagon has fired the editor-in-chief and publisher of the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

On Friday, the Pentagon provided separation notices to editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and publisher Max Lederer, CBS News reported. The notices said that the two had five days to appeal the decision, according to CBS.

Slavin told The Associated Press that he was dismissed for insubordination “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” In July, CBS published a story featuring an interview with Slavin, in which he stressed the importance of the newspaper’s independence.

“We need to be able to provide independent news to service members,” he told CBS. “If we can’t do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that's the foxhole.”

While Stars and Stripes receives part of its funding from the Pentagon, it has a years-long history of being editorially independent. In January, though, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the Department of Defense “is returning Stars & Stripes to its original mission” and is “bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century.”

“We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members,” he said in a post on X in January.

In March, more details about the department’s “modernization” overhaul for Stars and Stripes were revealed by an internal memo, which included a provision that content published by the newspaper must be aligned with “good order and discipline,” a phrase that is in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

News of the firings also comes after Lederer announced on Tuesday that he plans to retire, effective Sept. 30. Lederer, who has been publisher of the newspaper for nearly two decades, said that he came to the decision after he realized that his “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” diverged in “fundamental ways” from the Pentagon’s plans for the newspaper. He said he disagreed with parts of the modernization plan revealed in March, including the Pentagon’s desire to transition all print products to digital; Lederer said he worried that the move would affect the accessibility of Stars and Stripes for some service members.

“I think the right step is for me to step down, get out of the way, and let different leadership step in and continue to make this, the great organization that it is, even better,” Lederer told Stars and Stripes.

In April, the Department of Defense fired the newspaper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith. As ombudsman, Smith was tasked with ensuring the organization’s editorial independence. Smith told her colleagues in a message at the time, which was seen by The Washington Post, that the Pentagon didn’t provide a reason for her firing, but that she believed the decision came down because she criticized the agency’s moves to overhaul the newspaper.

“I knew it was risky to speak out, but my responsibility to Stripes and the First Amendment was paramount,” she wrote in her message to her colleagues, according to the Post.

In June, Smith filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Department of Defense, in which she alleged that her firing was retaliatory and a violation of her First Amendment rights.

The U.S.’s national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time ever this week—more than double what it was a decade ago.

The record-breaking figure comes after the government reported in March that the total debt reached $39 trillion, meaning that the debt grew by $1 trillion in less than half a year. Just a few months before that, in October, that figure was $38 trillion.

And the country has reached the $40 trillion milestone earlier than experts had previously predicted; in 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total debt wouldn’t hit that figure until 2028.

The debt has been increasing for decades, but much of the current total has been accumulated over the past ten years, during the administrations of President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Here’s how much the debt grew under each of their terms in the White House.

Trump’s first term

When Trump took office for his first term in January 2017, the total debt was about $19.95 trillion. When his presidency ended four years later, the debt stood at roughly $27.75 trillion, meaning that the debt rose by about $7.8 trillion under his Administration.

Biden’s term

The debt grew by about $8.4 trillion while Biden was in the White House, increasing from about $27.75 trillion when he was sworn into office in January 2021 to roughly $36 trillion by the time he finished his term in January 2025.

Trump’s second term so far

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term in January last year, the debt has gone up by about $3.8 trillion. That means that the national debt has climbed by a total of $11.6 trillion across the two Trump Administrations—so far—a figure that comprises more than a quarter of the total amount.

Why has the debt soared?

Experts credit a significant portion of the growth in the national debt to the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Reuters, about one-third of the growth seen since 2017 took place during two years or so of the pandemic, when the first Trump Administration and then the Biden Administration intensified borrowing to fund the country’s pandemic response and recovery.

Both Trump’s and Biden’s fiscal policies have also contributed to—and exacerbated—the longer-standing issue of government spending exceeding tax and other revenues, which has led to the ballooning national debt. 

For instance, according to the Brookings Institute, the tax cuts that Trump signed into law during his first year in office in 2017 were expected to contribute almost $2 trillion to the deficit by 2028. And in March, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicted that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a signature piece of his second-term agenda that also included steep tax cuts, will add $4.7 trillion to the national debt through 2035.

A woman who authorities have accused of planning to bomb the New York State Capitol building has been arrested and charged, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old woman from Albany, New York, was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in federal court the following day to face one count of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

“The FBI detected and stopped an alleged plot to attack the New York State Capitol and kill elected officials,” Matt Fodor of the FBI National Security Branch said in a statement. “According to the criminal complaint, the defendant in this case swore allegiance to ISIS and wanted to follow up with additional horrific acts of terrorism. This case is yet another example of how this FBI is built to not only identify threats of terrorism quickly, but to stop their alleged plots before they are able to harm the American people.”

A criminal complaint filed in federal court on Thursday outlines the FBI’s investigation into Bowie, including how agents reviewed social media posts she had shared with “anti-American messages” and the ensuing sting operation that led them to apprehend her.

An FBI confidential source, the document details, posed as an “ISIS facilitator” and began messaging with Bowie in July about “her plans to attack the New York State Capitol building in Albany.”

Bowie visited the building several times, according to the complaint. Included in the filing and the Justice Department’s press release was an image of an individual wearing all black and holding up a phone, seemingly to take a photo. The individual’s face is not visible in the photo, but authorities identified them as Bowie; the complaint says the image shows Bowie “doing reconnaissance on July 21” on the Capitol building.

The complaint goes on to describe an in-person meeting that Bowie had with two other FBI confidential sources on Aug. 5. The meeting was filmed and recorded, and the complaint alleges that Bowie “reaffirmed her desire to bomb the New York State Capitol” during the encounter. The filing includes part of the transcript from that meeting, during which she allegedly said that she would “ideally do [the attack] on a day when the most amount of senators are there, maybe we time it where there we know there’s a meeting with the senators, try and get a good enough explosive in there to kill the senators and ideally to destroy as much of the building as possible really.” She then said that she wanted “to be able to get away and migrate,” according to the complaint.

The complaint goes on to allege that Bowie and the two FBI informants discussed what items she would need to build the bomb and how she would obtain them. She later went to a Home Depot to purchase the materials, after one of the informants gave her $200 for the items, according to the complaint. The document and the Justice Department's press release include an image of someone wearing all black at a store “collecting the various items needed to build an explosive device.” As in the other photo, the individual’s face is not visible, but authorities identified the person as Bowie.

Last week, Bowie asked the first informant if they knew anyone who could sell her a gun, the complaint alleges. On Wednesday, it says, she allegedly met with the two other informants in a car and gave them $150 to buy a firearm, one magazine, and ammunition. During that meeting, the informants also showed her “an inert explosive device that was purportedly built using the components” she bought at the Home Depot earlier in the month, and showed her “how to operate the explosive device and further detailed how to detonate the device when she was ready to carry out the attack,” according to the complaint.

When Bowie exited the car—while in possession of the gun, magazine, ammunition, and the inert explosive device—she was arrested by FBI agents, the complaint alleges.

In a statement shared on X on Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul thanked the FBI and New York state police for their work apprehending the suspect.

“Earlier this year, amid a rise in political violence and threats against public officials, we took steps to strengthen security at the State Capitol and across state government,” the governor said. “While there is no immediate threat at this time, we will continue working closely with our law enforcement partners to protect New Yorkers and keep our communities safe.”

Tens of millions of State Farm customers are eligible to receive payments as part of a $5 billion dividend from the company’s Mutual Automobile Insurance, which State Farm has already begun doling out.

The dividend, first announced in February, is the largest in the company’s history. 

“This dividend is possible due to State Farm Mutual’s financial strength and a stronger than expected underwriting performance, which has been reported industry wide,” the company wrote at the time of the initial announcement. 

Here’s what to know about the dividend payments, and how to see if you’re eligible to receive one.

Who’s eligible?

More than 49 million vehicle owners across State Farm’s network are set to get dividend payments this summer, the company said. 

Customers who had a State Farm personal auto insurance policy active at any time in 2025. You do not need to be currently insured by State Farm to receive a payment. To receive a payment, customers' share of the dividend based on their premium payments and state must be $10 or more.

Qualifying customers who have an email address registered with the company will receive an email with further instructions on how to sign into a payment portal for the dividend and select the manner in which they’d prefer to be paid, the company said.

Those who are eligible but do not have a registered email with the company will automatically get a check in the mail. 

Customers can access information about their dividend payment at sfdividend.com. 

When will customers get their dividend payments?

The payments began going out on July 31. State Farm has not indicated when they will stop. 

“Millions of customers have already received their individual dividend payments, with more on the way,” State Farm announced when the payments began. 

Customers will be notified by State Farm regarding their pending payments “beginning late summer of 2026,” the company’s website states, adding that dividend payments are being sent out “in waves by state where the policy is assigned.”

Over 7.2 million checks have been mailed since payments began, with another 3.8 million set to go out this week, a State Farm spokesperson told CBS News in an email.

How much could eligible customers get paid?

The dividend payments average $100 per vehicle, according to State Farm. 

The amount an eligible customer receives will vary based on a couple of factors, however. The payment a customer gets will be based on a percentage of the premiums they paid, and that percentage ranges from 4% to 10% depending on the customer’s state.

A slice of the nation’s capital will be transformed into a race track over the weekend for President Donald Trump’s final event commemorating the U.S.’s 250th birthday. 

An IndyCar race consisting of 25 drivers will take place around the National Mall in the heart of Washington, D.C., on Saturday and Sunday. 

IndyCar is the top level of single-seater auto racing in the U.S., best known for the “Indy 500,” an annual 500 mile race in Indianapolis. 

"This will be like no other race ever. This will get the highest ever ratings of any such race," Trump said in July, when the top IndyCar drivers participating in the race visited the White House.

Trump himself is scheduled to take a ride around the 1.7 mile race track in his presidential limousine, known as “The Beast” before the competition begins, White House officials told multiple outlets.

The event is being hosted by Freedom 250, the organization Trump established through an Executive Order in January to coordinate the Administration’s semiquincentennial events. The race follows other high profile events this summer in celebration of the milestone anniversary, including a UFC fight on the White House grounds, an athletics tournament dubbed the Patriot Games, and the world’s largest fireworks show. 

Here’s what to know about the 250 Grand Prix . 

When is the race?

Practice races will take place on Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m. local time and continuing throughout the day. 

The real race will then begin at 1:10 p.m. on Sunday.

What is the route?

Drivers will race for 147 laps, covering a distance of roughly 250 miles. 

The 1.66 mile, 7-turn track begins on 3rd Street near the Capitol building at the east end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., before jutting down Pennsylvania Avenue, the course’s longest straight at 0.4 miles. It then makes turns on 9th Street, 7th Street, and Independence Avenue, passing sites including the Lincoln Reflecting Pool and the Smithsonian Museum before circling back onto 3rd street to finish off. 

Who’s paying?

Penske Corp., the owner of IndyCar, is picking up most of the tab for the race, according to Bud Denker, Penske Corp. president and chair of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.

An exact price tag for the event is unknown, but Denker said in July that the race is “much more” than IndyCar’s Detroit street race, which has a budget of $20 million. 

A $90 million budget allocated by Congress for special events in Washington will cover security costs, according to Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah, who spoke at a public briefing in July. 

The federal funding is a part of the Emergency Planning and Security Fund, which is designed to support presidential events, including those related to the U.S.’s 250th birthday.  

How can you watch?

Organizers expect roughly 140,000 spectators to attend the race in person throughout the weekend. 

Free tickets were given to 100,000 people through a lottery. The only other way to watch the event up close is to purchase an all-inclusive food and beverage weekend pass to the Champions Club, an exclusive viewing venue built for the race overlooking 7th Street and the National Mall, for nearly $5,500. 

Venues for the race open to the public at 8 a.m. on both days.

For viewers watching the race remotely, FOX will be streaming the events. 

You can also access FOX’s coverage through certain streaming platform bundles such as YouTube TV, Hulu +, Fubo, or Sling TV. 

Flight disruptions

The Federal Aviation Administration last week said it expects to pause flights at Reagan National Airport for three hours for the race from 10:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. on Sunday. 

“The FAA has been planning and coordinating with stakeholders to help ensure the safe and efficient movement of air traffic during Freedom 250 events,” the agency said in a statement. “As part of that effort, the agency will implement traffic management initiatives at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”

Flights were also halted for several hours on July 4 due to Trump’s fireworks show. 

Concerns for D.C. artifacts 

Due to the vibrations caused by the race cars, some preservationists and museum representatives are worried for the safety of artifacts stored in the many museums along the race route. 

Mary Okin, the assistant director of the Living New Deal, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the legacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote a letter last month to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) expressing her concern that the vibrations could damage the frescoes of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building, which the GSA manages. 

“In the foreseeable event of a race vehicle losing control, or a crash that sends debris, such as tire marbles flying, or sparks a fire, what protective features will be in place ahead of the race to ensure that vibration, flying car parts, and other high speed or collision impacts do not damage this national treasure?” Okin additionally cautioned in her letter, referencing the Wilbur J. Cohen building. 

The National Gallery of Art previously conducted a study to gauge the potential threat of the vibrations, but did not reveal its findings. 

“In preparation for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the National Gallery conducted an extensive vibration study and based on the results we have implemented a set of measures to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, collection, and facilities during the race,” gallery spokesman Chris Abanavas said in a statement to The Washington Post. “While we are not releasing the specifics, I can share that any such measures are only being taken out of a great abundance of caution.”

The Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing funding.

The order, issued Monday by the Defense Department, instructs universities to review their ties to 130 foreign institutions, mainly Chinese, that “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” Schools that fail to terminate any “problematic” partnerships within two weeks may lose their eligibility for future federal research funding.

The order is intended to protect taxpayer-funded research from “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said.

The announcement did not identify which schools had received the order or how they were selected, but a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University.

The order is the latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education. The Trump Administration and several lawmakers from both parties have argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.

U.S. concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage have grown in recent years. Last year, a federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang of stealing files containing trade secrets from a Pentagon-funded project. Prosecutors said he planned to use the technology in a Chinese business backed by government entities. In May, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned after admitting to acting as an unregistered Chinese government agent before taking office.

But some observers have warned that the crackdown unfairly politicizes academic collaboration, stigmatizes Chinese academics, and could weaken American scientific competitiveness.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement to news outlets that it opposed “the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges.”

“The U.S. side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it added.

Here’s what to know about the raft of policies aimed at curbing institutional ties to China.

Order targets primarily Chinese institutions

The foreign institutions the U.S. seeks to blacklist were identified by the Pentagon last month. Eighty-eight of the 130 institutions are in mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran. The list has been updated annually since an earlier version was first released in 2023. It was established under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which was enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term.

While some Chinese universities on the list have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships. These include Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The updated list also added a number of other Chinese institutions with varying links to China’s defense and security establishment, including Shandong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenyang Aerospace University, and the University of International Relations.

People familiar with Chinese academic institutions previously told TIME that Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities, making institutional links to the government common, even though individual students or researchers may not be engaged in political or military work.

The Pentagon also instructed universities to audit collaborations with organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Confucius Institutes are non-profit language and cultural programs funded by the Chinese government and hosted in universities around the world. Launched in 2004, there were at one time more than 100 Confucius Institutes operating on U.S. college campuses. But most U.S. programs closed after 2019 amid congressional scrutiny and federal funding restrictions. By late 2023, there were fewer than five active Confucius Institutes in the U.S.

Many universities, however, retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Of 74 former Confucius Institute hosts surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, 43 said they maintained ties to their former Chinese partner institutions. Nine reported receiving continued funding or other support for programming from those institutions, although eight of the nine said the partnerships predated their Confucius Institutes.

Crackdown on broader Chinese ties

The Trump Administration has pursued a slate of policies that build on Trump’s first-term “China Initiative.” These have included tighter scrutiny of universities’ foreign funding and research partnerships and restrictions on collaborations with blacklisted Chinese institutions. The Trump Administration has also increased vetting of Chinese student visa applicants, threatened visa revocations for some students, and renewed investigations of China-linked researchers.

Since last year, the Pentagon has prohibited funding fundamental research projects conducted in collaboration with a listed foreign institution or its employees. The policy was expanded in March to bar the use of equipment from listed entities in certain Pentagon-funded projects.

Meanwhile, China has sought to bring in more foreign talent and investment, including by seeking to attract more international students to its universities and exchange programs, and by introducing a K visa for young foreign STEM professionals.

Dozens of Chinese tenure-track scholars have left U.S. universities for China over the past year.

Days before the latest announcement, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee released a report accusing Harvard of failing to adequately screen its relationships with Chinese institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s defense industry. The investigation said it identified more than 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and scholars at certain Chinese defense-linked civilian universities.

Harvard disputed the report’s “mischaracterizations,” and said it follows federal national security standards.

The changes also come as the U.S. seeks to maintain its lead over China in the global AI race. A 2025 report warned that major AI data centers in the U.S. were vulnerable to Chinese espionage, sabotage, and intellectual property theft.

In July, the Administration recommended redirecting potentially billions of dollars of federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI-focused projects as part of an effort to counter Chinese scientific advances.

Last week, Reuters also reported that the Administration was preparing to tell 35 partner countries that participation in Pax Silica—a U.S.-led initiative to strengthen supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure—was conditioned on their refusal to join China’s rival AI framework. The reported demand appeared in an internal draft and has not been formally issued.