How animals will react to solar eclipses can only give hints of animal behavior because the relatively few studies of the topic are often conflicting. One study in 1560 cited that “birds fell to the ground.” Other studies said birds went to roost, or fell silent, or continued to sing and coo — or flew straight into houses. Dogs either barked or whimpered, or did not bark or whimper.
A study of the 1932 eclipse, which was thought to be the first comprehensive research conducted on the subject and included observations from the public, explained that it received “a good deal of conflicting testimony” from people who had observed mammals. It concluded that several animals showed the strongest responses: squirrels ran into the woods and cattle and sheep headed for their barns.
Meanwhile, we humans might freak out our pets just as much as the sudden darkness does:
Most animals will likely be confused by the darkness and will start their nighttime routines, said Dr. M. Leanne Lilly, a veterinary behaviorist at Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
But the way humans react to the eclipse — looking at the sky, expressing excitement or gathering in a group — could affect domesticated animals, like dogs or cats, because pets can act strangely when their humans are acting strangely, Dr. Lilly said.
“That can make any of our domestic animals feel like things are not as safe and predictable as they are supposed to be,” Dr. Lilly said, adding that any unusual human behavior can disturb pets because they are “domesticated to attend to us.”
“We might be the problem,” she said, with a laugh.
“Most animals will be overall unaffected by the eclipse, but pet owners may notice brief periods of confusion, and dogs and cats may exhibit fear and confusion,” said Dr. Katie Krebs, a veterinarian and professor at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Pets may hide, howl, pace or pant during the eclipse, Krebs said. As the sky darkens, some pets may start their nighttime routine early. The average indoor dog or cat is likely not going to be affected by the eclipse, said Dr. Rebecca Greenstein, veterinary expert with pet care company Rover.
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Jersey and New York City on Friday morning, followed by a 4.0 magnitude aftershock in the evening — surprising and confusing area residents not used to seismic phenomena. Below are the latest updates and everything we know about the quake, aftershock, and aftermath.
After their debut, menswear analyst Derek Guy wrote a thread on X speculating on where they might be coming from (“from the soles, I will assume somewhere in a low-cost Asian country,” he claimed) and how much it might cost to manufacture them. He highlighted the fact that the website is offering only preorders for the shoes as one way Trump might profit:
There’s no distributor or retailer, as Trump is selling it directly to consumers. How much did it cost to make this website? Maybe $100? There’s no overstock or inventory to worry about, as everything was sold on pre-order. So, for a shoe that prob costs $20 to make, maybe we can add another $20 for various associated costs. That’s still a 10x markup from cost to retail, with all the profit being pocketed by Trump. This is not at all comparable to how other fashion companies price things.
Some sneakerheads have noted that the shoes look like sneakers you could order from a big China-based marketplace like AliExpress or Temu and simply customize with a T and some American flags.
At The Bulwark, self-professed sneakerhead Joe Perticone offered a more detailed analysis. First, he emphasized that “it’s important to understand that the online sneaker market is Grifter City”:
Pure garbage is upsold for insane amounts over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). This excess value is determined by a number of different factors: scarcity, what’s currently (and fleetingly) considered “cool,” and unpredictable events — for example, the sighting of a celebrity wearing the yet-to-be-released kicks. Scarcity is the only factor that is in any way quantifiable, which is one of the reasons the online sneaker market is so volatile that it makes cryptocurrency look like the S&P 500.
Perticone added that the Trump Sneakers designs “are years behind current sneaker trends”:
To my eye, the [Trump Sneakers] appear to be cheap wholesale shoes with some shiny branding stitched on the sides. They don’t carry the material heft associated with premium sneakers, such as soles made by top-tier Italian producers like Margom or Vibram …
The team behind Trump’s MAGA Stan Smiths appears to have borrowed the design of the shoe from the waning days of the George W. Bush administration: The $399 gold “Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers” are reminiscent of the Adidas high-tops designed by Jeremy Scott and popularized by rapper Lil Wayne during the late 2000s. Meanwhile, Trump’s other two sneakers — a $199 design that comes in red (“T-Red Wave”) or white (“POTUS 45”) — bring to mind the sock-style shoes that have been around for decades but took the sneaker market by storm in recent years thanks to innovative designs by Kanye West.
Watch dealer and influencer Roman Sharf won a pair of the “Never Surrender” gold high-tops with a $9,000 auction bid the same day the sneakers were launched. He later told the New York Times that “they’re still new — they smell like glue.” That is definitely not a good sign. According to sneaker authenticator Rami Almordaah, who spoke with the Los Angeles Times for a story in November about detecting counterfeit sneakers:
Inside the box, Nikes and Jordans have a distinct smell. The fakes have a strong alcohol or a strong glue smell. The real ones have their own distinct smell, and it’s always the same.
So if the Trump sneakers smell like glue, it is possible that they may be no better quality than cheap knockoffs.
Putting the question of quality aside, Roman Sharf got a lot in return for his purchase. “I spent $9,000 for $9 million worth of publicity,” he told Intelligencer, describing the many interviews he has done. After the auction, he also says that Trump invited him and his son to lunch at the Trump International Golf Club. “It was just a conversation between the boys that felt like I was one of the boys, to be fair,” Sharf said.
On Sunday afternoon outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., 25-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell placed his phone on the ground to set up a livestream. He then stood before the embassy gates and lit himself on fire while shouting “Free Palestine” in a horrific protest against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Below is everything we know about Bushnell, who died from his wounds on Sunday night.
Bushnell was a 25-year-old member of the U.S. Air Force stationed at the Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio and originally from Whitman, Massachusetts. He joined the Air Force as an active-duty member in May 2020 and has since worked in information technology and development operations. In a statement on Monday, the Air Force stated that he was a cyber-defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron.
Bushnell grew up in a religious group on Cape Cod called the Community of Jesus, whose former members have come forward alleging abuse and a rigid social structure. According to a family friend and former Community of Jesus member who spoke with the Washington Post, he was raised in a religious compound in Orleans associated with the group. The friend told the Post that young people in the Community of Jesus often join the military, moving from “one high-control group to another high-control group.”
Friends who spoke with the Post say that while Bushnell was stationed in San Antonio, he was attending events for a socialist organization and delivered food to people on the street. Friends state that his contract with the military was to expire in May and he was looking for a career transition. Following the police killing of George Floyd, they say he had become more open in his objection to the military. “He said that he kind of went from one extreme — the conservative beliefs that he had grown up around — to the opposite, forming his anarchist, anti-imperialist values,” a friend in San Antonio told the New York Times. “And he said it was a very quick shift, and he just said it went from one extreme to the other.” In late 2023, friends say he moved to Ohio as part of a military training program for transitioning out of active duty.
On Sunday, hours before he went to the Israeli embassy, Bushnell texted a friend who shared the message with the Post. “I hope you’ll understand. I love you,” Bushnell wrote. “This doesn’t even make sense, but I feel like I’m going to miss you.” Weeks earlier, Bushnell talked on the phone with the same friend about “their shared identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective,” according to the Post.
A friend who spoke to the New York Post states that Bushnell spoke to him on the phone on Saturday night. Bushnell said that he had top-security clearance and that he was distressed by what he was seeing in Gaza. “He told me on Saturday that we have troops in those tunnels, that it’s U.S. soldiers participating in the killings,’’ the friend said. “There’s just too many things I don’t know, but I can tell you that the tone of his voice just had something in it that told me he was scared,’’ the friend said. (While the U.S. has special-operations troops in Israel to reportedly identify American hostages, the Biden administration has stated that there will be no American soldiers in Gaza.)
Hours before lighting himself on fire, Bushnell posted a Twitch link on his Facebook page with the caption:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
Shortly before 1 p.m. on Sunday, Bushnell began his livestream and walked toward the Israeli Embassy with an insulated water bottle full of flammable fluid. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said in his video. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
Bushnell then placed his phone on the ground and walked to the gates of the embassy, where he doused himself in liquid from the bottle. “Free Palestine,” he said, as he struggled to light himself. A law-enforcement officer approached, asking, “Can I help you, sir?” At this point, Bushnell lit himself on fire, screaming, “Free Palestine.”
As Bushnell screamed in pain, a law-enforcement officer off-camera yells at him to “get on the ground.” A second officer yelled at the first: “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.” By the time D.C. Fire and EMS arrived on the scene, the fire had been put out.
An incident report filed by a Secret Service agent states that they “received a distress call regarding an individual exhibiting signs of mental distress outside the Israeli embassy.” (The Secret Service is responsible for foreign-embassy security.) “Before the Secret Service officers could engage, [Bushnell] doused himself with an unidentified liquid and set himself on fire. The Secret Service officers promptly intervened, extinguishing the flames before the arrival of the fire department. [Bushnell] was subsequently transported to a local hospital due to the burns sustained from the incident. The report states that Bushnell was pronounced dead at 10:06 p.m. on Sunday.”
In the hours before his death, Bushnell emailed several left-leaning websites alerting them to his “highly disturbing” final act. “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” read the email, which was forwarded to the BBC.
Bushnell’s video was taken down by Twitch for violating its terms of service, though edited versions blurring out his burning figure are circulating on social media. The Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating the incident along with the Metropolitan Police Department. Prior to his death, he emailed several left-leaning websites, stating that he was “planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
People who knew Bushnell in San Antonio were stunned by his act. At a public vigil for Bushnell in the city on Friday, one told the BBC that “Initially, there was just a lot of shock and sadness, that he felt this was the only action that he could do to bring attention to something that he cared heavily about. It’s hard that he chose these actions, it’s hard to comprehend even from people who sympathise with a ceasefire and the safety of Palestinian people and civilians.”
Bushnell’s act was not the first self-immolation in apparent protest of the Israel-Hamas war. In December, a woman lit herself on fire in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in what police described as an act of “extreme political protest” over the war. The woman survived but sustained third-degree burns over her entire body and was hospitalized in critical condition. Her identity has not been released by police. A 61-year-old Army veteran who worked as a security guard at the consulate suffered severe burns when he attempted to save the woman.
Since the Vietnam War, self-immolation has been a dramatic but rare act of protest in the U.S. Vigils were held throughout the country on Monday night in memory of Bushnell, including at the Israeli Embassy where he held his final protest.
Two days before the New Hampshire primary in January, a robocall featuring an AI-generated imitation of President Biden’s voice was sent out to thousands of people in the state urging them not to vote. The call was also spoofed to appear as if it had come from the telephone of a former state Democratic Party official. Independent analysis later confirmed that the fake Biden voice had been created with ElevenLabs’ AI text-to-speech voice generator.
The New Hampshire attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the robocall and subsequently determined it had been sent to as many as 25,000 phone numbers by a Texas-based company called Life Corporation, which sells robocalling and other services to political organizations.
On February 23, NBC News reported that a New Orleans magician named Paul Carpenter had admitted using ElevenLabs to create the fake Biden audio. Carpenter said he did it after being paid by Steve Kramer, a longtime political operative then working for Democratic presidential candidate (and AI proponent) Dean Phillips. The campaign has denied having any knowledge of the effort.
“I was in a situation where someone offered me some money to do something, and I did it,” Carpenter said. “There was no malicious intent. I didn’t know how it was going to be distributed.” He told NBC he was admitting his role in part to call attention to how easy it was to create the audio:
Carpenter — who holds world records in fork-bending and straitjacket escapes, but has no fixed address — showed NBC News how he created the fake Biden audio and said he came forward because he regrets his involvement in the ordeal and wants to warn people about how easy it is to use AI to mislead. Creating the fake audio took less than 20 minutes and cost only $1, he said, for which he was paid $150, according to Venmo payments from Kramer and his father, Bruce Kramer, that he shared.
“It’s so scary that it’s this easy to do,” Carpenter said. “People aren’t ready for it.”
“If it is true that Mr. Kramer had any involvement in the creation of deepfake robocalls, he did so of his own volition which had nothing to do with our campaign,” Phillips’ press secretary Katie Dolan said. “The fundamental notion of our campaign is the importance of competition, choice, and democracy. We are disgusted to learn that Mr. Kramer is allegedly behind this call, and if the allegations are true, we absolutely denounce his actions.”
In a statement to NBC News, Kramer eventually admitted he was behind the robocall, which he said he sent to 5,000 likely Democratic voters. He claimed he did it to prevent future AI deepfaked robocalls:
“With a mere $500 investment, anyone could replicate my intentional call,” Kramer said. “Immediate action is needed across all regulatory bodies and platforms.”
Photo: Annabelle Gordon/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The special counsel investigating Joe Biden determined in a report released Thursday that the president would not be charged with any crimes for taking classified documents to his home in Delaware in his years between the White House. Robert Hur, the former U.S. Attorney assigned to the case, also detailed in the report numerous instances when Biden appeared to have problems with his memory.
The details of Biden’s classified-documents handling are likely to be overshadowed by Hur’s observations about the president’s memory. In several different passages, Hur paints a picture of Biden as not only forgetful but deeply unaware of when key events in his life took place. Polls have consistently shown that Biden’s age is the American public’s biggest concern about him.
Hur writes that during interviews with a ghostwriter in 2017 and with Hur’s office in 2023, Biden seemed confused on a number of occasions. In one interview, Biden did not recall exactly when he was vice-president and that he could not remember the year of his son Beau’s death. Hur also writes, in language that appears to editorialize, that Biden was “hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”
Hur even suggests that Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” in his words, was one of the reasons he chose not to prosecute the president. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Hur concludes that at a possible trial, “Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It was a line that was immediately seized upon by Republicans to prove their point that the president is too old and doddering to be re-elected.
Biden’s team pushed back on the memory issue. Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, and Bob Bauer, his personal counsel, wrote in a letter to Hur that “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.” They added that “the report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”
In a statement, Biden himself noted that he sat for “five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
Hur found that Biden had taken home “classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan” as well as handwritten notebooks on national security and foreign-policy issues that involved “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.” The FBI found these documents in the basement, garage, and office of Biden’s home in Wilmington in a voluntary search last January.
Hur declined to prosecute Biden for the retention of classified documents, citing the president’s cooperation with investigators. Donald Trump, who was charged with willful retention of national-defense information, did not cooperate in several attempts to recover the material — to the point that Trump was also charged for making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Hur’s report also states that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Several of the documents were handwritten notes related to classified information provided in the daily presidential brief and national-security-council meetings. Hur also states that Biden provided some classified material to his ghostwriter for his memoir Promise Me, Dad. In one recording from February 2017 obtained during the investigation, Biden told his ghostwriter that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” at a house he was renting in Virginia.
Hur stated that this recording was the strongest evidence for potential prosecution, but that it would be unlikely for a jury to convict him. National Archives and Records Administration officials have stated that members of every administration since Reagan have mishandled documents in some capacity. Hur wrote that vice-presidents and presidents often get used to keeping documents at home. (The audio of Biden discussing classified documents in the basement was recorded just weeks after Trump’s inauguration.) Hur also stated that the “badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus” in Biden’s garage suggests that he could have forgotten about some of the classified documents, rather than withheld them intentionally.
After the report was released, Donald Trump released a statement decrying the Justice Department’s decisions to prosecute him but not Biden, claiming Biden handled documents in a much worse way than he had. Soon after, on Truth Social, Trump wrote that “Biden took the Documents in his ‘mental primetime’” but otherwise just echoed his previous statement. He later began reposting other people’s messages highlighting the details in the report about Biden’s memory.
