Tela Bio, a Malvern-based medical-technology company, plans to cut about 20% of its workforce.
The layoffs, most of which are to take place this month, will reduce the company’s headcount from 201 full-time employees to 160, according to an SEC filing last week. The locations and types of jobs affected were not specified. Company executives say the move is part of a larger plan to slash Tela Bio’s annual operating expenses by about $17 million.
CEO Heather Getz said in a statement that they are “implementing a broader initiative to strengthen our cost structure and position Tela Bio for long-term success.”
Headquartered in the Great Valley Corporate Center, Tela Bio makes biological products for soft-tissue repairs, including hernia surgeries and ab-wall reconstructions. Among its products: OviTex tissue, made from sheep stomach, which Tela Bio says promotes natural healing while reducing plastic in the body.
Last year, Tela Bio reported more than $80 million in revenue, up 16%, which the company attributed to an increase in customers and higher sales overseas, according to earnings reports. But with $88 million in operating expenses, the company continued to operate at a loss, as it has since its founding in 2012.
Company executives expect these layoffs to cost about $1.5 million in severance and other employee payouts, according to the SEC filing.
On Monday, the company also parted ways with Roberto Cuca, who had served as chief financial officer and chief operating officer since 2021. Per the SEC filing, Getz, the CEO, will become the company’s “principal financial officer.”
Tela Bio executives said they’ll provide more information on cost-cutting efforts on the company’s next earnings call, scheduled for November.
“We are focused on disciplined execution, strengthening the business, and creating a more efficient organization positioned to deliver sustainable long-term growth,” Getz said, adding that executives ”expect this initiative to extend our cash runway into 2028.”
Getz was appointed CEO last month, succeeding Tela Bio cofounder Antony Koblish. Previously, Getz was executive vice president and chief financial and operations officer at Butterfly Network, a portable-ultrasound company.
In announcing Getz’s hiring, Tela Bio executives said she made “transformative changes in [Butterfly Network’s] strategy, capital allocation, cash runway and investor relations while building a performance culture.”
A federal judge said Tuesday that he will not call Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to testify about his actions in a controversial post-conviction case — despite the fact that some of Krasner’s own staffers have accused him of overseeing the matter in ways they viewed as inappropriate.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond came at the end of a multiday hearing at which two of Krasner’s prosecutors testified about the discord that emerged among lawyers in the office as they worked to determine whether a man’s murder conviction should be overturned.
Both prosecutors who testified Tuesday, David Napiorski and Peter Andrews, largely echoed assertions two of their colleagues made on previous days of the hearing — including that Krasner vehemently opposed referring the case to the state attorney general’s office, and that he threatened unspecified “consequences” for those who didn’t follow his orders.
In earlier testimony, other staffers accused Krasner of calling state prosecutors “Nazis” and growing “apoplectic” when they memorialized their disagreements with him in writing. Diamond last week also suggested that some actions in the case could amount to crimes including perjury, conspiracy, or obstruction of justice.
Napiorski and Andrews continued to paint a portrait of an office consumed by internal conflicts over its actions in the matter. And they accused Krasner of sometimes amplifying the drama.
Despite that, Diamond said at the conclusion of the hearing that he did not intend to hear from any other witnesses, including Krasner. Instead, Diamond said, his next step would be to determine whether Krasner’s office should be allowed to continue participating in the case moving forward. He did not specify how quickly that ruling might come.
Krasner declined to comment Tuesday. He has previously declined to talk about the matter, saying it would violate ethical rules to do so while it remains pending.
The underlying case is the conviction of Dennis Johnson, who was found guilty of second-degree murder in 2009 for fatally shooting Kenyatta Smith outside a North Philadelphia convenience store.
Johnson appealed his conviction, in part because he said his trial attorney was ineffective. And in 2022, a newly hired prosecutor in Krasner’s law division, Jaclyn Mason, filed court documents agreeing with him and saying his conviction should be overturned.
But this spring, some of Mason’s colleagues began reviewing the case and took the opposite view — in part because they said she’d made clear and important mistakes in her brief supporting Johnson’s position.
That set off a sequence of events that has gone on to roil Krasner’s office.
First, Mason’s supervisors said they had to withdraw her brief and apologize to Diamond for her mistakes — an unusual step for lawyers to take in court.
And although they said they offered Mason a chance to join that effort, she resigned instead, saying she’d only filed her brief because her boss, Matthew Stiegler, had pressured her to do so, and that she didn’t want to be used as a scapegoat for the office.
In the weeks that followed, prosecutors testified, Krasner became involved in a series of disputes with those who remained on the case, including Napiorski, Andrews, and two of their colleagues: Katherine Ernst and Steven Wildberger.
All four went on to testify that they believed their office should recuse itself from handling Johnson’s case because their internal discussions had veered into areas of self-preservation rather than the merits of Johnson’s claims.
But Krasner disagreed, they said, at times angrily. He said he would not refer the case to the attorney general’s office because he viewed their staffers as “Nazis,” according to Ernst and Wildberger. And they and Napiorski said Krasner also wanted to keep the case in-house to “protect the office.”
By mid-July — about six weeks after Mason resigned — Ernst, Wildberger, Napiorski, and Andrews filed documents with Diamond saying they could no longer participate in the case due to the behind-the-scenes drama.
Krasner, in a court document of his own, called their assertions unauthorized and “ill-informed.”
As Diamond weighs how to sort out the turmoil, Roy Clark, Johnson’s father, said he’s become demoralized by how attention has shifted away from whether or not his son should be released from prison.
“With all the in-house fighting and stuff for the DA’s Office, it takes the human component out of the case,” he said outside the courthouse Tuesday. “We’re trying to get my boy home.”
Staff writer Jesse Bunch contributed to this article.
LAS VEGAS — A jury found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of orchestrating the 1996 killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur, finally bringing a measure of resolution to a case that had gripped hip-hop fans and lingered in the public imagination for decades.
The 63-year-old Davis was convicted Monday of a single count of murder with a deadly weapon and could be sentenced to life in prison. The jury deliberated for less than three hours after a weekslong trial in Las Vegas.
After the verdict was read, Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, cried and hugged the prosecutors. Davis’ son covered his face with one hand.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors in closing arguments earlier Monday that Davis acquired a gun and “went hunting” for Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight after the men had beaten up Davis’ nephew earlier that night.
“He is responsible of the murder of Tupac Shakur,” Palal said. “Tell him you hear him. Find him guilty.”
Prosecutors said that while his story had changed over the years, Davis repeatedly placed himself inside a white Cadillac from which the shots were fired. And they said that while he did not pull the trigger, evidence showed he’d called for the gunfire as a powerful gang leader the younger men in the car, including his nephew, were going to listen to.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft asked jurors if there was any evidence that Davis had ever called the shots before or after the shooting.
The panel of 16 jurors, four of whom are alternates, heard testimony from 24 prosecution witnesses and three defense witnesses over nine days.
The prosecution said the state would dismiss a gang enhancement charge due to witness logistics. Prosecutors declined to comment following the verdict, and members of Shakur’s family said they were waiting until sentencing, which is scheduled for October.
Decades-old case has drawn attention of hip-hop fans and crime experts alike
The trial brought to a head a decades-old case that for years has drawn the attention of hip-hop fans and true crime experts alike. Shakur, who was considered one of the most influential rappers of all time, was in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996, and stopped at a red light when a white Cadillac pulled up beside him, and shots were fired. He died six days later from his wounds. Knight was also wounded but survived.
For years, nobody had been charged in the rapper’s death until Davis began making public statements, saying he was in the Cadillac and gave the gun to others in the backseat, calling the shooting a retaliation for the earlier beating of his nephew. Davis is the only person still alive among the four men prosecutors say were in the Cadillac.
Defense argued public statements were untrue, physical evidence was lacking
Sanft, Davis’ attorney, argued there was no physical evidence connecting his client to the shooting. He said the book Davis co-authored and the public statements he made were dramatized bravado designed to make money, not to tell the truth.
Throughout the trial, Sanft poked holes in prosecutors’ narrative. He said investigators did not back up the claims made by his client, and he repeatedly pointed out a lack of physical evidence, such as phone records, that showed Davis was the shot caller.
“They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996,” Sanft said during his closing argument.
In a rebuttal argument, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo pointed to a scrapbook Davis kept containing articles about Shakur.
“This guy’s scrapbooking his murder, for God’s sake,” DiGiacomo told jurors.
Davis’ own words were front and center
Palal held up Davis’ 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, and played an interview in which Davis encouraged people to buy it to get the “real truth.” Although the book contains a disclaimer saying some facts were changed, prosecutors argued the central account did not.
Sanft also turned to his client’s memoir during his closing argument. While reading an excerpt, he said the N-word aloud, prompting people watching in an overflow courtroom to recoil and shake their heads.
In multiple interviews, Davis said he handed the gun to the back seat, but in others as well as in his book, Davis wouldn’t say who pulled the trigger.
Gang and record label rivalries provided the backdrop
While insisting Davis’ words alone were enough to convict him, prosecutors said a gang rivalry helped explain why the shooting happened.
Witnesses described the hostile rivalry between the Los Angeles gang sects leading up to Shakur’s death, and how the gangs became affiliated with two rival labels — Mob Piru with Knight’s Death Row Records and the South Side Compton Crips with Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records.
The shooting death of Bad Boy’s the Notorious B.I.G. six months after Shakur came up many times during the trial, with law enforcement witnesses saying Davis was briefly a suspect in that killing before being discounted. That case, which has also been an obsession of hip-hop fans, remains unsolved.
An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.
The disclosure, made public Tuesday morning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), says the Postal Service has adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy” under which an entire batch of ballots would be rejected if a single barcode sampled by a postal employee could not be scanned or matched with information submitted through a new online portal. A batch could contain tens of thousands of ballots, according to the disclosure.
“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal said in a call with reporters.
Postal officials and the White House did not immediately provide comment.
In public statements, the Postal Service has previously said information submitted through the portal will be updated immediately. It has said postal employees will not determine voter eligibility or check names and addresses for accuracy. The rule does not disclose the sampling formula or zero-failure policy described in the whistleblower disclosure.
The fight over the Postal Service’s plans is rooted in an executive order from Trump that seeks to overhaul mail voting. A judge has blocked those plans for now, but the administration is seeking to reinstate them ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
If the administration gets its way, state and local election officials would have to upload lists of voters to an online portal the Postal Service is designing. Postal employees would refuse to deliver to anyone who is not on those lists.
The unnamed official alleged that the portal was assembled under constantly changing requirements and with as few as four working days available for customer testing before a planned launch.
If the Postal Service’s plans go into effect, election officials will confront new challenges when they mail ballots in large batches. Postal workers plan to scan barcodes on a sample of envelopes to ensure the voters appear on the state’s list, according to the whistleblower. If they find even one mismatch, they will refuse to accept the entire batch, the whistleblower said. That means a single mismatch in a batch of 10,000 ballots would prevent the 9,999 other ballots from being mailed until discrepancies were resolved.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” the disclosure said. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
State and local officials often mail ballots in large batches to manage them as effectively as possible. Some states send ballots to all registered voters, and they must place millions of ballots in the mail in a short period.
Many election officials have expressed alarm about the Postal Service’s overall plans under Trump’s executive order because they don’t believe they have been adequately thought through for a fast-approaching election.
Among the issues they worry about are potential mismatches for mundane reasons. States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.
The Postal Service has said states can update their voter lists, but election officials have expressed concerns that the new online portal won’t be able to handle a steady stream of updates.
The whistleblower disclosure could add to those concerns and bolster legal challenges to the executive order and postal rules.
The disclosure, dated Sunday, was submitted to Blumenthal by Whistleblower Aid on behalf of an anonymous federal official it represents.
The organization described the unnamed whistleblower as a “federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development” of the Postal Service’s plans and said the official feared reprisal by administration officials if identified.
Blumenthal sent the disclosure late Monday to Postmaster General David Steiner and asked him to provide documents about the Postal Service’s plans.
Blumenthal is the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
States and voting rights groups sued over the executive order soon after Trump signed it in March. The Supreme Court last week allowed work on the executive order to proceed for the moment, but days later a lower court blocked it.
The administration is seeking to get it reinstated but faces timing challenges. Officials in North Carolina are preparing to start mailing ballots on Friday under a state law requiring them to send them to those who ask for them starting 60 days before an election. Other states are set to start mailing their ballots in the following days and weeks.
The whistleblower said the Postal Service stopped working on the portal around June 25 after a federal judge blocked implementation of Trump’s directive, then resumed work around July 29 while that order remained in effect.
The disclosure said work continued after the judge issued a new order on Thursday barring the Postal Service for 14 days from taking further preparatory steps that would apply to all states for the November election. In a brief ruling Monday, the judge said the Postal Service could work on the portal for states that want to voluntarily use it.
Postal officials planned to launch the portal on Tuesday, according to the whistleblower. One of the whistleblower’s attorneys, David Kligerman, said work on the portal had continued in recent days but didn’t know whether the Postal Service was sticking with its plan to make it available on Tuesday.
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial ended a fourth day of deliberations without a verdict Tuesday after earlier saying they couldn’t agree whether the Massachusetts mother is criminally responsible for killing her three young children.
Not long after arriving at the courthouse, the jury sent Judge William Sullivan a note saying they had been unable to reach a unanimous decision despite many hours of back and forth. He told them to keep trying.
It was the jury’s first indication of an impasse in the closely watched trial that has focused on maternal mental health after childbirth, and which has stirred deep divisions among the public.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, doesn’t deny strangling her children but says postpartum psychosis led to her actions. Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing. Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
Clancy stared straight ahead as the jury entered in the morning to say they were at a standstill, then looked toward them as the judge spoke.
Sullivan told the jurors that he recognized it had been a long trial with more than 80 witnesses and 300 exhibits. “But because of that, I’m going to ask you to go back out,” he said.
They’re expected to resume deliberations Wednesday.
What happens if there’s a hung jury
The jury, which began deliberating Thursday afternoon, could convict Clancy of murder or manslaughter, or acquit her if they believe her deteriorating mental health was to blame.
A conviction could lead to a life prison sentence. If she is acquitted, a judge could still order her confined to a mental health facility if an evaluation determines she is a danger to the public.
If jurors can’t reach a verdict and a mistrial is declared, the charges against Clancy would remain. Prosecutors would need to decide whether to try Clancy again before an entirely new group of jurors.
Prosecutors could offer a plea deal to Clancy, although her attorney is more likely to push for them to drop the charges, said Brad Bailey, a Boston defense attorney and former prosecutor who is not involved in the case.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington called it a good sign that the jury hasn’t given up. “I think that they’re showing that they are more than willing to keep working at it,” he said.
Trial focused on mental health
During more than four weeks of testimony, jurors heard differing views from medical experts.
Clancy’s lawyer argued she loved her children, but killed them because she lost her grip on reality — and on herself — due to bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness that can follow childbirth.
Prosecutors said Clancy was depressed and tired of living, and made a conscious choice to kill the children. A forensic psychologist who testified for the prosecution said he concluded that Clancy killed the children because she wanted to end her life but didn’t want to leave them behind.
Clancy’s mother and sister testified that she became anxious, paranoid, and suicidal after the birth of her third child. She sought treatment for her worsening mental health, including a stay in a psychiatric hospital, in the months before killing Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, ages 5 years, 3 years, and 8 months.
Less than three weeks after being discharged, she sent her husband on an errand and killed the children with exercise bands in the basement of their home south of Boston. She then jumped from a second-floor window and remains paralyzed from the waist down. Her lawyers say she heard a voice telling her to kill the children so she could end her own life.
Lindsay Clancy didn’t take stand during her trial
Clancy chose not to testify. She watched the proceedings from the defense table, occasionally weeping, as when prosecutors showed autopsy photos of the children to the jury.
Jurors spent two days listening to testimony from her former husband, Patrick Clancy, and his anguished 911 call. He was on the phone when he discovered the children’s bodies, minutes after finding his wife.
Patrick Clancy has said in interviews that he forgives his ex-wife, whom he viewed as ill rather than evil. The trial marks the first time he has seen Lindsay Clancy since the killings.
Postpartum psychosis, the condition that Clancy’s attorney says she had when she killed the children, is more serious and less common than postpartum depression. Researchers estimate that the condition afflicts 1 to 2 out of 1,000 women after delivery.
The Philadelphia School District has pushed back the application window for its 37 magnet schools.
The news hinges on PSSA scores, which have not been released to the public by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Instead of students submitting applications for the 2027-28 school year between Sept. 8 and Oct. 30, as originally announced, the application window will now open Oct. 5 and close Nov. 24, officials announced Monday night.
Students will use both their 2024-25 PSSA results and the yet-to-be-released 2026 scores.
“This adjustment ensures families have access to official, verified 2026 assessment data when making their school choices,” officials said in a letter to families.
The PSSAs remain a question mark for the district.
Harrisburg officials released preliminary data to districts in the late spring, as they typically do, but Philadelphia has shared only limited student PSSA scores with select staff. Most Philly principals and teachers have not seen the scores, though other districts and schools have not withheld the data.
State education officials notified districts last week that statewide results, typically available to districts in late August or early September, would be delayed, though the release of the data to parents and the public does not typically happen until the fall.
Philadelphia officials then suggested the state holdup was the reason for their own delay.
A district spokesperson said the system expects scores in adequate time to make admissions decisions.
“Once the verified 2026 PSSA and Keystone results are released by PDE later this fall, district staff will contact all applicants to assist them with submitting their scores,” officials said in the letter to parents. “Families do not need to take any action regarding their 2026 assessment scores at this time.”
A school selection town hall is scheduled for Wednesday at Powel Elementary, 3610 Warren St., from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Another town hall will be held virtually on Thursday from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Legend has it that the continued ban of liquor sales in Collingswood, which dates back to 1873, was a stipulation when the park was dedicated in 1888. If alcohol sales were ever permitted, the story goes that the nearly 70-acre park would cease to be a public asset and would be sold to developers.
With Collingswood voters set to decide on the future of alcohol sales in November, questions about the potential impact on Knight Park have swirled on social media and reached borough officials.
“Knight’s Park [sic] existence depends on the longtime tradition of Collingswood being a dry town,” one person wrote on Facebook.
“I recall hearing that if Collingswood was no longer a ‘dry town’ they would lose Knight’s Park [sic] as that was part of the agreement when the family donated it. Anybody know if this is true?” another person asked.
So, is there any truth to the rumor? No, according to officials.
“It’s an old wives tale,” borough administrator Cassandra Duffey said in an email. “There is no relationship between Knight Park and liquor licenses.”
Duffey, a 20-year resident of the borough, said she’s not sure of the rumor’s origin and that it predated her arrival in Collingswood.
“I’ve had to dispel this rumor every year I’ve been here,” she said.
The triangle-shaped park in the center of the borough was gifted by businessperson Edward C. Knight, in memory of his parents, according to the park’s website.
The park has been overseen by an independent seven-person board of trustees that works with the borough to coordinate and run local sports leagues and public events.
Bordered by Browning Road and Collings and Park Avenues, Knight Park boasts athletic fields, a walking and biking path, a playground, and a pond. Over the years, the park’s popular gazebo has become a local destination for weddings and other celebrations.
Like other public parks in Collingswood and across South Jersey, alcohol is not permitted — though that appears to be the only alcohol-related rule officially connected to the property.
The future of Knight Park has no connection to liquor sales in the borough, Collingswood officials emphasized.
“It’s a persistent rumor, but only that,” Duffey said.
An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.
The disclosure, made public Tuesday morning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), says the Postal Service has adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy” under which an entire batch of ballots would be rejected if a single barcode sampled by a postal employee could not be scanned or matched with information submitted through a new online portal. A batch could contain tens of thousands of ballots, according to the disclosure.
“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal said in a call with reporters.
Postal officials and the White House did not immediately provide comment.
In public statements, the Postal Service has previously said information submitted through the portal will be updated immediately. It has said postal employees will not determine voter eligibility or check names and addresses for accuracy. The rule does not disclose the sampling formula or zero-failure policy described in the whistleblower disclosure.
The fight over the Postal Service’s plans is rooted in an executive order from Trump that seeks to overhaul mail voting. A judge has blocked those plans for now, but the administration is seeking to reinstate them ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
If the administration gets its way, state and local election officials would have to upload lists of voters to an online portal the Postal Service is designing. Postal employees would refuse to deliver to anyone who is not on those lists.
The unnamed official alleged that the portal was assembled under constantly changing requirements and with as few as four working days available for customer testing before a planned launch.
If the Postal Service’s plans go into effect, election officials will confront new challenges when they mail ballots in large batches. Postal workers plan to scan barcodes on a sample of envelopes to ensure the voters appear on the state’s list, according to the whistleblower. If they find even one mismatch, they will refuse to accept the entire batch, the whistleblower said. That means a single mismatch in a batch of 10,000 ballots would prevent the 9,999 other ballots from being mailed until discrepancies were resolved.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” the disclosure said. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
State and local officials often mail ballots in large batches to manage them as effectively as possible. Some states send ballots to all registered voters, and they must place millions of ballots in the mail in a short period.
Many election officials have expressed alarm about the Postal Service’s overall plans under Trump’s executive order because they don’t believe they have been adequately thought through for a fast-approaching election.
Among the issues they worry about are potential mismatches for mundane reasons. States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.
The Postal Service has said states can update their voter lists, but election officials have expressed concerns that the new online portal won’t be able to handle a steady stream of updates.
The whistleblower disclosure could add to those concerns and bolster legal challenges to the executive order and postal rules.
The disclosure, dated Sunday, was submitted to Blumenthal by Whistleblower Aid on behalf of an anonymous federal official it represents.
The organization described the unnamed whistleblower as a “federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development” of the Postal Service’s plans and said the official feared reprisal by administration officials if identified.
Blumenthal sent the disclosure late Monday to Postmaster General David Steiner and asked him to provide documents about the Postal Service’s plans.
Blumenthal is the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
States and voting rights groups sued over the executive order soon after Trump signed it in March. The Supreme Court last week allowed work on the executive order to proceed for the moment, but days later a lower court blocked it.
The administration is seeking to get it reinstated but faces timing challenges. Officials in North Carolina are preparing to start mailing ballots on Friday under a state law requiring them to send them to those who ask for them starting 60 days before an election. Other states are set to start mailing their ballots in the following days and weeks.
The whistleblower said the Postal Service stopped working on the portal around June 25 after a federal judge blocked implementation of Trump’s directive, then resumed work around July 29 while that order remained in effect.
The disclosure said work continued after the judge issued a new order on Thursday barring the Postal Service for 14 days from taking further preparatory steps that would apply to all states for the November election. In a brief ruling Monday, the judge said the Postal Service could work on the portal for states that want to voluntarily use it.
Postal officials planned to launch the portal on Tuesday, according to the whistleblower. One of the whistleblower’s attorneys, David Kligerman, said work on the portal had continued in recent days but didn’t know whether the Postal Service was sticking with its plan to make it available on Tuesday.
Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is leading a new funding round in Polymarket that values the prediction market at $21 billion, a spokesperson for 1789 Capital said Monday.
Polymarket plans to raise $1 billion, including around $300 million from 1789 Capital, the spokesperson, Alexa Henning, said. The investment firm previously invested about $200 million in the prediction market, which is currently valued at about $15 billion.
Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have exploded in popularity over the past year. The platforms allow users to place wagers on the outcome of a wide variety of events, such as what the president will say in a speech or who will get married on “Love Is Blind.”
The Trump family has built up a financial stake in the industry since last year. Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi as an adviser last year and received shares in the company worth more than $300,000. He also began advising Polymarket and invested in it via 1789 Capital.
At the same time, his father, President Donald Trump, has taken steps to boost the industry. Michael S. Selig, whom the president appointed to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction markets, has spoken enthusiastically about the companies and sued states that tried to regulate them. The president declared on Truth Social that prediction markets would “thrive” under his leadership and said Selig was “respected by all.”
Bloomberg earlier reported that 1789 Capital was leading Polymarket’s funding round.
Many of the companies that 1789 Capital has invested in have large government contracts, while others, like Polymarket, have benefited directly from new Trump policies or rollbacks of existing laws, The New York Times has reported. The investment firm also bought shares in some of the most coveted private companies before many went public, including SpaceX, Anduril, Cerebras and Reflection AI.
Two years ago, 1789 Capital managed a few hundred million dollars. It now oversees more than $3 billion.
Donald Trump Jr. told the Times this year that he invested as a private citizen and held “no policy position and no role within the administration whatsoever.”
A group of Democratic candidates has drawn attention this election cycle because of their deep religiosity. Two prominent candidates for the U.S. Senate, for example, James Talarico of Texas — a Presbyterian with a recent seminary degree — and Adam Hamilton of Kansas, senior pastor of a United Methodist megachurch, frequently discuss their faith and cite the Bible on the campaign trail.
But those candidates are not winning the support of many white evangelicals.
A recent Fox News poll showed that only 21% of white evangelical voters in Texas support Talarico, even in a race against a scandal-ridden opponent who had an extramarital affair.
Policy differences over abortion and LBGTQ+ rights — two issues that have long been central concerns for white evangelical conservatives — at least partly account for this. Talarico and Hamilton both support abortion rights, and they’re running against Republicans who do not.
But a more fundamental issue also makes it hard for Christian Democrats such as Talarico and Hamilton to make inroads with conservative white evangelical Christians. The Religious Left champions cultural pluralism, while a Christian national identity drives the Religious Right — and there’s an unbridgeable gap between the two. This divide has helped to shape American politics for more than a half century.
It helps explain why more than 80% of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for President Donald Trump in each of his three presidential races. It’s also the reason why, in 1980, a majority of white evangelical voters supported Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced and was a less frequent churchgoer, over President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher.
In each case, white evangelicals considered a candidate’s faith and personal behavior to be far less important than their top priority: finding someone who championed their understanding of the place of Christianity and Christian-based sexual morals in the nation.
This wasn’t always the case. In the mid-1970s, leading American evangelical magazines such as Christianity Today called for the election of morally exemplary, born-again Christian candidates on the grounds that only Christian politicians could rescue the nation from moral decline. When Carter ran for president in 1976, many evangelicals decided he fit the bill, and backed the Democrat.
But some evangelicals quickly regretted this choice. Both Carter and more conservative evangelicals believed that the United States was morally adrift. Yet, their understanding of the sources of that national moral decline differed.
For Carter, whose moral consciousness was shaped in part by his interactions with civil rights activists, racism and the destruction of the environment were moral evils. That meant that the solution to America’s moral problems would focus on greater equality, as well as a more responsible use of the environment. The United States faced a “moral and spiritual crisis,” he said — but that crisis could best be addressed by a reduction in “self-indulgence and consumption,” not through a public affirmation of America’s Christian identity.
Moreover, as a moderately liberal Baptist — a tradition that had historically championed religious liberty — Carter was a religious pluralist who eschewed public endorsements of Christianity and embedding his personal religious beliefs in public law.
He opposed the White House church services that President Richard Nixon had created. He publicly endorsed the Supreme Court rulings that curtailed classroom prayer in public schools, because he said that “as a Baptist,” he believed that “the Government ought to stay out of the prayer business.” And although he personally opposed abortion, he refused to support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision — which conveyed a right to have an abortion — because he thought that in a pluralistic society, it was improper for the federal government to impose one religious group’s view of abortion on others.
Conservative evangelicals, however, recoiled from these views. To them, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was a much greater evil than racial injustice or environmental destruction. It threatened the fundamental building block of society: the family. And the source of the sexual revolution, they thought, was a national rejection of God, which was manifest not only in religious pluralism but also in the Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion.
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In the late 1970s, this concern prompted the formation of the Christian Right. At its heart, this movement was a campaign to restore an imagined lost world of the 1950s — an era that had combined more conservative sexual standards with national legislation to make “In God We Trust” the national motto. Conservative evangelicals thought those values had been lost amid the anti-war protests and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Some evangelical leaders argued that the answer was mobilizing and electing a president who shared their hunger to return to the world of the 1950s. “The hope of reversing the trends of decay in our republic now lies with the Christian public in America,” Moral Majority founder (and Baptist megachurch pastor and televangelist) Jerry Falwell declared in 1980. “Our Founding Fathers separated church and state in function, but never intended to establish a government void of God … We cannot be silent about the sins that are destroying this nation … We must turn America around or prepare for inevitable destruction.”
White evangelical Christians had voted for Republican presidential candidates before — including in 1972, when they overwhelmingly supported Nixon’s reelection. But Falwell’s Moral Majority and other allied groups, such as Christian Voice and the Religious Roundtable, broke new ground in channeling evangelicals’ generally conservative instincts into a much more tightly focused campaign to restore Christian values through public law. That campaign put them at odds with religious pluralists like Carter.
These new groups backed Reagan, and other candidates like him, who they believed would oppose further secularization of the nation’s laws and culture and prevent any further sexual liberalization. The Religious Right also opposed candidates who were strong cultural pluralists, since they thought that secularization and a pluralistic understanding of the nation’s religious identity had undermined the country’s moral foundation.
Sometimes that meant backing less personally devout, morally compromised candidates, since the most vocal advocates of a public affirmation of Christianity’s place in public life were sometimes infrequent churchgoers whose sexual lives were far from monogamous. To these evangelical activists and voters, politicians’ policy choices mattered far more than their personal behavior. As Christian Voice executive director Richard Zone put it when endorsing Reagan, he “was not the best Christian who ever walked the face of the earth.” But to Zone, “we really didn’t have a choice.”
When the group issued a “Moral Report Card” in 1980 that rated every member of Congress on the morality of their votes, pious churchgoers such as Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and Rep. Robert Drinan (D-Mass.), the only Catholic priest serving in Congress, received moral ratings of zero, while Rep. Richard Kelly (R-Fla.), who was sentenced to prison a few months later for accepting bribes in the Abscam scandal, received a rating of 100. Even the devout evangelical Baptist Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.), a liberal Republican who opposed abortion but warned against “mix[ing] piety with patriotism,” found himself at odds with the Christian Right.
And little has changed in terms of this picture over the last 46 years. Once again, in 2026, in Kansas, Texas and elsewhere, evangelical voters have a choice similar to the one that evangelicals confronted in 1980: vote for the most religiously devout Christian candidate on the ballot or vote for a candidate who shares their vision of the nation.
If history is any indication, most of them will choose the latter. Fundamentally, white evangelical voters understand that progressive Christian candidates are usually cultural pluralists whose faith is shaped by values of equality. They don’t see secularization and the sexual revolution as the threats that most white evangelicals do. Instead, progressive Christians are often more concerned about what they see as the threat to the rights of religious and sexual minorities posed by Christian nationalism.
This history suggests that if progressive Christians like Talarico and Hamilton win their House and Senate races in November, it will be by overcoming white evangelical opposition, not because they hit upon a formula to win over the most conservative churchgoers.
Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
