More people have now died from 9/11-related illness than died on the day itself. Three days before the 25th anniversary, NYC released 170,000 pages of records showing officials knew the air was toxic and said otherwise.
NYC released 9/11 records showing officials knew the air was toxic and said otherwise. More people have died from 9/11-related illness than died on the day itself. Canada imposed $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs. Republicans opened Trumpapalooza in Dallas. Tuesday had range.
The 9/11 anniversary is Friday. Today is Tuesday. Three days before the 25th anniversary, New York City released 170,000 pages of records showing city officials knew the air at Ground Zero was toxic and told residents it was safe. Here is Tuesday.
NYC released 170,000 pages of 9/11 records today. They show city officials knew the air was toxic. They told residents it was safe. More people have now died from 9/11-related illness than died on September 11 itself.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records documenting the government's response to the September 11 attacks, resolving a multi-year legal battle brought by 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued the city for the documents. The documents were discovered in 68 boxes stored in a city government office. Within weeks of the collapse, employees and residents were allowed to return to nearby buildings. Two weeks after the collapse, both the federal government and the Giuliani administration said there was "minimal risk" from the air surrounding Ground Zero. The documents show the city's own internal testing told a different story. The World Trade Center Health Program, the federal program providing medical care for survivors and first responders exposed to toxins from the September 11 attacks, now has 145,000 enrolled patients, more than 57,000 of whom have battled cancer. The number of certified 9/11 cancer cases at Northwell Health jumped 118% in two years. More than 6,000 people have died from 9/11-related illness since the attacks.
"Our warnings were not heeded, and now we and the public know that City Hall, led by former Mayor Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health impacts from these toxins," said Congressman Jerry Nadler. "They lied to limit their liability and hid the records," said Andrew Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001. More than 6,000 people have since died from illnesses caused by what they breathed in the weeks, months, and years after that day. The deaths from 9/11-related illness now exceed the deaths from the attack itself by more than two to one. The records released today describe the gap between what the city knew and what it said as deliberate. The 170,000 pages went into 68 boxes. The boxes sat in a city government office for 25 years. A lawsuit forced their release. A mayor who was not in office during the attack released them three days before its 25th anniversary. The firefighters who worked the pile, the residents of Lower Manhattan who returned to their apartments, the students at Stuyvesant High School a few blocks from the site who went back to school two weeks after the towers fell, they made decisions based on what the government told them. The government told them the air was safe. The government knew it was not.
Canada imposed $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs on US goods at midnight. Prime Minister Carney said Canada is at war. Canadians are boycotting American products.
Canada imposed tariffs at midnight Tuesday on about $20 billion worth of US goods, including appliances, motorcycles, dairy products, steel, aluminum, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics, in dollar for dollar retaliation for the 50% tariffs President Trump imposed on Canadian products two weeks ago. Carney said: "In too many areas, they wanted dependency, not a true economic partnership." He vowed to move faster to reduce Canadian economic reliance on the United States. About 400,000 people used to cross the US-Canada border daily. Canadians have sharply cut US travel and begun boycotting American goods.
Canada's retaliatory tariffs impose duties ranging from 15% to 50% on more than 700 US products. The Canadian government also announced a $5.42 billion funding package to help small and medium Canadian businesses absorb the trade war's impact. Chrystia Freeland, who negotiated the USMCA free trade agreement with the Trump administration during his first term, told NPR: "I do think we need to recalibrate global trade to protect blue-collar manufacturing jobs in high-wage countries. The USMCA does that." That agreement is now the framework under which both countries are conducting a tariff war. The US-Canada trade relationship is the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world. More than 400,000 people used to cross the border daily before the trade war. Experts who spoke to NPR expect the US to respond to Canada's retaliation with further escalation. The cycle the reporter described, escalation answering escalation, is the one both countries are now inside.
Republicans opened "Trumpapalooza" in Dallas today. It is the first midterm convention in modern American political history. Fewer than half of vulnerable Republican candidates are speaking.
Republicans descended on Dallas Tuesday for the first ever Republican midterm convention, a two-night event branded by RNC chairman Joe Gruters as "Trumpapalooza," with President Trump headlining both Wednesday and Thursday nights at American Airlines Center. Fewer than half of the Republican candidates in competitive House and Senate races are on the speaker list. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is sending a counter-delegation of House Democrats to Dallas. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is also heading to the city to support Texas Democrats.
A midterm convention is unprecedented in modern American politics. The Republican Party is holding one because it is worried. Trump's approval ratings sit at record lows. Democrats lead polls for House control. Historical headwinds favor the party out of power in a midterm and the party in power is the Republican Party. The convention is designed to answer a question the party has not asked publicly: can Republicans hold Congress when Trump is not on the ballot? The strategy is to make him the ballot anyway. Five-figure ticket costs and fundraisers throughout the week suggest the primary audience is donors as much as voters. The fact that fewer than half of Republicans in competitive districts are speaking tells you something specific about how those candidates are calculating the Trump association in their own races. They are letting him speak. They are not standing next to him when he does.
A new study found ICE raids cost Chicago more than $1.26 billion in local economic activity. Fear kept immigrants home. The economy felt it immediately.
The study is the first major economic accounting of what happens to a local economy when a large ICE enforcement operation runs through it. The mechanism is direct and documented: when immigration enforcement increases in a community, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, reduce their presence in public commercial spaces out of fear. They stop going to restaurants. They stop shopping at retail stores. They pull their children from school. They avoid public transit. Each of those individual decisions is a rational response to a real risk. The aggregate of those individual decisions is a $1.26 billion hole in Chicago's local economy. The sales tax revenue that funds city services, the restaurant industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, the retail sector that anchors commercial neighborhoods, all of it contracted when the enforcement operation ran. The ICE raids did what they were designed to do: produce deportations. They also did something they were not designed to do: produce a billion-dollar economic contraction in one of the country's largest cities. Both outcomes belong in the same accounting.
Houthi attacks ignited fires at Saudi Arabia's oil facilities today and wounded 73 people. The war in Yemen just opened a new front.
The Houthis attacking Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure directly is a significant escalation in the Yemen conflict that ended its four-year ceasefire. Saudi Arabia's oil facilities are a critical node in the global energy supply chain: the kingdom produces roughly 9% of global oil and is the world's largest oil exporter. The energy market is already absorbing the Iran war, the Hormuz disruptions, Hurricane Karina approaching Hawaii's oil-adjacent Pacific infrastructure, and now Houthi attacks on Saudi facilities. An oil market that has been running at $93 a barrel has new upward pressure arriving from a new direction. 73 people wounded at oil facilities in Saudi Arabia is the human cost of that new direction arriving today.
The US economy has gone C-shaped. The top is doing fine. The bottom is struggling. Now the middle is being squeezed from both sides.
The K-shaped recovery described an economy where higher-income households recovered quickly from the pandemic and continued to improve, while lower-income households continued to deteriorate, with the two groups diverging like the two arms of a K. The C-shaped analysis is a specific modification of that framework: the top is still doing well, the bottom is still struggling, and now the middle, the broad American working and middle class that had been spared the worst of the K-shaped divergence, is being squeezed from both sides simultaneously. From above, asset prices and returns on capital continue to benefit higher earners. From below, inflation, energy costs, and trade war tariffs on consumer goods are eroding purchasing power for households that do not hold significant assets. The C shape is the curve of that pressure arriving at the center. The gas at $4.14 a gallon we noted Monday is one data point of the squeeze. The Canada tariffs on appliances and dairy that took effect at midnight are another. The ICE raids that cost Chicago $1.26 billion in economic activity are a third. The C-shaped economy is not an abstraction. It is what is arriving at the middle of the income distribution this September.
Physicists just observed Einstein's gravity in the quantum world for the first time. The finding puts one of his foundational ideas to a striking new test.
Physicists have directly observed a long-predicted quantum effect of gravity, putting one of Einstein's foundational ideas to a striking new test. The experiment measured the interaction between gravity and the quantum mechanical behavior of very small particles, directly confirming a prediction Einstein made but that no experiment had previously been able to verify.
Einstein's general theory of relativity describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles at the smallest scales. These two frameworks have resisted unification for more than a century, largely because the conditions under which they interact, where both gravity and quantum effects are simultaneously significant, are extremely difficult to produce and measure in a laboratory. Today's finding is not a full unification of the two theories. It is the first direct experimental observation of a quantum effect predicted by general relativity, a confirmation that Einstein's description of gravity holds even at scales where quantum mechanical behavior dominates. The finding does not resolve the century-long incompatibility between the two frameworks. It confirms that the incompatibility is not at the level Einstein described. That is a meaningful distinction. The universe's operating instructions are still being read. One more line was confirmed today.
Austin Tice has been missing in Syria for more than a decade. Nobody knows what happened to him. NPR went looking for answers.
American journalist Austin Tice, a freelance reporter and former US Marine who was covering the Syrian civil war for McClatchy Newspapers and other outlets when he disappeared at a checkpoint near Damascus in August 2012, remains missing more than 14 years later in what NPR describes as one of the biggest missing-person cases of our time. The US government believes he is alive. His family believes he is alive. No group has officially claimed responsibility for his capture.
Austin Tice disappeared in August 2012 when Syria's civil war was entering its most chaotic phase, with government forces, multiple rebel factions, and foreign intelligence services all operating in overlapping and contested territory. A video of Tice surfaced weeks after his disappearance showing him alive and distressed, but no proof of life has been produced since. The US government has offered $20 million for information leading to his release and has engaged multiple foreign intermediaries. The Syria we covered August 26, when the US delisted it as a state sponsor of terrorism after 47 years and the Assad government fell, is now a different Syria from the one Tice disappeared into. His case predates Assad's fall, predates the chemical weapons strikes, predates the ISIS expansion and contraction, predates the Russian intervention, and predates the government's collapse. He has been missing through all of it. The US government's stated belief that he is alive is not evidence of where he is or who has him. It is a position maintained in the absence of evidence to the contrary. More than a decade is a long time to not know.
The thread underneath Tuesday
NYC released 170,000 pages of 9/11 records showing city officials knew the air at Ground Zero was toxic and told residents otherwise, the documents living in 68 boxes in a government office for 25 years before a lawsuit forced their release three days before the 25th anniversary, with more than 6,000 people having died from 9/11-related illness since the attacks, more than died on the day itself. Canada imposed $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs on more than 700 US products at midnight, Carney said Canada is at war, Canadians are boycotting American goods, and experts expect the US to escalate further. Republicans descended on Dallas for the first ever GOP midterm convention with Trump headlining both nights and fewer than half of vulnerable Republican candidates willing to stand next to him on stage. A new study found ICE raids cost Chicago more than $1.26 billion in lost economic activity as fear kept immigrants home from restaurants, retail stores, and public spaces. Houthi attacks ignited fires at Saudi Arabia's oil facilities and wounded 73 people, opening a new front in a regional conflict that is already running through Yemen, Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and Gaza. The US economy has gone C-shaped, with the middle class now being squeezed from both sides by asset prices and inflation simultaneously. Physicists observed Einstein's gravity in the quantum world for the first time, confirming a prediction a century in the making without resolving the underlying incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Austin Tice has been missing in Syria for more than 14 years and nobody knows what happened to him. Early statin use linked to 15% lower dementia risk in a Danish study of 132,000 people. The NFL season opens tomorrow night with the Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl rematch at Lumen Field, the defending champions raising their banner without their MVP Kenneth Walker III who signed with Kansas City in March. Kenya's president ordered a crackdown on foreigners running small businesses amid accusations of xenophobia.
Eight sections, 63 days until the midterms. The 25th anniversary of September 11 is Friday.
What to watch tomorrow: Watch whether Trump's Wednesday night convention address moves any of the approval rating numbers that have Republicans in competitive races keeping their distance from the stage. Watch whether the US responds to Canada's $20 billion retaliatory tariffs with further escalation, because the cycle experts described is the cycle both countries are now inside. Watch the Houthi Saudi oil facility situation for any production disruption report, because an attack that wounded 73 people at an oil facility is an attack that may have damaged infrastructure, and the oil price reads that impact on Wednesday morning. And watch whether the Department of Justice makes any statement about the 9/11 toxic air records released today, because 170,000 pages describing what the federal government also knew about Ground Zero air quality are now public, not just what the city knew. See you tomorrow.
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