New Jersey hospitals could lose an estimated $3.6 billion from Medicaid changes through 2032, forcing them to bring their expenses in line, Inspira Health Network CEO Amy Mansue said Friday during a panel discussion in Cherry Hill.
“That will only happen with dramatic changes in how we look at our business,” she said during the Southern New Jersey Development Council’s Annual Health Care Leadership Forum at the Legacy Club of Woodcrest.
Mansue predicted that health systems will close little-used programs. “There is no way to cut that much money out of the hospitals without doing some of that,” she said.
The $3.6 billion estimate from the New Jersey Hospital Association does not include hospitals’ losses from the growing population of uninsured people who show up at emergency departments because they can’t afford to pay cash for a doctor visit.
The hospital executives pleaded for state officials to reduce the red tape that makes it hard to implement programs needed to meet community needs.
“We need to be more nimble, we need to be more adaptable, we need to be more flexible,” said Aaron Chang, president of Jefferson Health NJ, which includes hospitals in Cherry Hill, Stratford, and Washington Township.
Jennifer Khelil (left), Virtua Health’s chief clinical Officer; Aaron Chang (center), president of Jefferson Health New Jersey; and Amy Mansue, CEO of Inspira Health spoke Friday at the Southern New Jersey Development Council’s Health Care Leadership Forum.Southern New Jersey Development Council
Inspira is adding a $220 million patient tower at Inspira Mullica Hill in Harrison Township, near the intersection of Routes 55 and 322. Construction is expected to be completed Oct. 1, Mansue said. “The reality is we’re not going to open until March” because it will take that long to get all the regulatory approvals, she said.
Inspira operates three other hospitals in Cumberland and Salem Counties.
Raynard E. Washington, who heads the N.J. Department of Health, spoke after the panel and said Gov. Mikie Sherrill is serious about making it easier to do business in the state. She told state agencies “to limit additional regulations and to look for opportunities to streamline,” he said.
Workforce development is a top priority
Six years ago, Virtua and Rowan University started working together to create the Virtua Health College of Medicine & Life Sciences out of Rowan’s School of Osteopathic Medicine, Rowan’s School of Nursing & Health Professions, and Virtua’s Our Lady of Lourdes Nursing School, plus a new school of translational biomedical engineering and sciences.
The institution officially launched in 2022 with $85 million in support from Virtua and $125 million from Rowan and has seen its class sizes grow steadily.
“We are now training about 360 nurse graduates every year, 300 medical students,” said Jennifer Khelil, Virtua’s chief clinical officer. Virtua operates five hospitals in South Jersey.
Workforce efforts also reach into high schools, Chang said. Jefferson Cherry Hill Hospital has a relationship with Cherry Hill West High School that brings 12 to 15 interns to the hospital.
“Because of the internship, their exposure to the hospital environment, whether it’s the ancillary departments and or the clinical areas, over 95% of those individuals get a healthcare job as a first foray into the workforce,” Chang said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the time period for the Medicaid cuts.
In the late 1970s, comic artist Art Spiegelman and his wife, the editor Françoise Mouly, began dreaming up a new magazine, one they hoped would elevate cartooning into the realm of high art.
A colleague suggested that they talk to Jerry Moriarty, a painter who lived in Manhattan, a little uptown from their SoHo loft.
Arriving at Mr. Moriarty’s studio, Spiegelman was stunned by what he encountered: comics that were painted.
“It was totally mind-blowing,” Spiegelman, whose graphic memoir Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, said in an interview. “It was exactly what we were groping for, which was a place that wasn’t underground comics anymore, nor was it art underground.”
Raw, their magazine, debuted in 1980 with Jack Survives, the first in a series of painted comics by Mr. Moriarty about a stoic Everyman who muddles through the indignities of life in a hat and tie, refusing to capitulate.
“It’s as if Edward Hopper had taken up songwriting,” comic artist Chris Ware wrote in the Believer magazine in 2009. “For lack of a better word, it’s poetry — I believe the first that comics has ever seen — and poetry as fresh and affecting now as when first drawn.”
Mr. Moriarty died on March 25 at his home in Binghamton, N.Y., where his nephew Kevin Moriarty had been caring for him in his final years. He was 88. His death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by his brother Fred Moriarty, who survives him.
A self-described loner, Mr. Moriarty refused to sell his paintings, and supported himself by teaching at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In many ways, he had the sort of average life embodied by his Everyman character, Jack, who resembled Mr. Moriarty’s father in appearance (and only in appearance).
“Jack is an average man wanting to be average,” he wrote in The Complete Jack Survives, a 2009 collection of his Jack comics. “I am an average man who doesn’t want to be average, and art allows me to express that frustration.”
Jack’s spare dialogue — often spoken aloud to himself — reminded Mr. Moriarty’s admirers of Samuel Beckett’s minimalist, existentialist plays.
In another panel, Jack is in his office. He opens his lunch and discovers that his wife has packed him a cat-shaped cookie.
“I can’t eat a cat cookie,” he says out loud, seemingly to nobody, before taking a bite. “You have to start with the head or it looks at you to the end.”
To describe his craft, Mr. Moriarty created a portmanteau: paintoonist, a fusion of painter and cartoonist. The word hasn’t yet appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it certainly defined him.
“There’s a kind of stillness in his work,” Hillary Chute, a professor at Northeastern University and a scholar of graphic narratives, said in an interview. “So you enter it as a story, and it has psychological depth, but also the kinds of composition that you would see in paintings.”
Jerome Brien Moriarty was born on Jan. 15, 1938, in Binghamton, the third of four children. His father, John Moriarty, was an expert in Morse code who telegraphed play-by-play accounts of sporting events for the Associated Press. His mother, Esther (Turner) Moriarty, sold magazine subscriptions and worked as a sales clerk at a department store.
Growing up, Jerry loved cowboy movies and radio shows. He also read and collected comics.
“At age 8, I crossed the ‘fantasy barrier’ and became an ‘art kid’ because I could copy Superman or Bugs Bunny better than my classmates,” he wrote in the catalog for “Uninked: Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Works by Five Cartoonists,” a 2007 exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum.
His father bought him a drafting table and encouraged him to pursue a career in art, setting up a studio in the cellar.
“It was dank, low and funky, but I loved the cellar because no one came down there unless they had to,” Mr. Moriarty said in the Believer. “Sometimes my dad came down after supper and watched me paint, still in his shirt and tie from work.”
After graduating from high school, he moved to Brooklyn to study at the Pratt Institute, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1960.
He remained in New York City, working as a freelance illustrator and contributing drawings to Esquire, GQ, Seventeen, the New Yorker, and pinup magazines. In 1963, he began teaching at the School of Visual Arts, painting in his studio at night.
Jack came along in the late 1970s after a student gave Moriarty a copy of the war comic Frontline Combat, which he had read as a teenager.
“I took it home and I fell on the floor,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Daily Cross Hatch, an online comics journal. “Not only was it better than I remembered, it was inspiring. I thought, ‘How many other things since that period have I not seen?’ So I started going to comic cons, and that’s where the collector in me started to awaken.”
To Moriarty, Jack wasn’t just a character on canvas; he was a way to reconnect with his father, who had died when he was 14.
“Jack Survives is a whimsical, one-sided conversation with my father where I am 99% of it,” he told the Believer. “Dad is in Jack as a quiet presence who survives Jack’s frustrations far better than I do.”
Mr. Moriarty moved on from Jack in the late 1980s and continued to paint, though in an entirely new way — in panel form, much like a comic book artist. In one painting, Moriarty peers down from the ceiling at his father, who is reading the newspaper. In another, he is an old man painting in his cellar.
“There was no conscious attempt to be poetic or subtle,” he said. “I am not a fan of bigness or theatricality. I prefer string quartets to symphonies, jazz trios to big bands.”
He also savored solitude.
“Loner and loneliness are not the same,” he said. “Everybody has been lonely, but not everybody is a loner. Jack is alone, but he is not a loner. I am a loner, and I fully understand why that makes me strange to society. I am not lonely. Being alone is total freedom for me.”
He usually started painting after midnight, finished by 3 a.m., ate dinner, watched movies, went to bed at 7 a.m., woke up at 2 p.m., had breakfast and watched Jeopardy! He had no use for the hoity-toity art world.
“It was about as pure an experience of being an artist as I’ve ever witnessed,” Spiegelman said. “It was, in some ways, without ambition and without a thought about posterity.”
Rachel Maddow’s brief turn as a Philadelphian began with her bicycle being stolen on the first day of a new job.
“I got to work at 9 a.m. and I got out for lunch before noon, because I didn’t have anything to do,” Maddow said. “My bike was already gone.”
MS NOW’s top star was in Center City on Thursday night to interview constitutional legal expert Sherrilyn Ifill live in front of nearly 2,000 people at the Academy of Music.
But prior to the event, she reminisced about her brief time in Philly in the early 1990s, shortlyafter she came out as gay during her freshman year of college at Stanford University.
“It didn’t go well at home, so it was a bit of a scramble in terms of like paying for college, figuring out what I was going to do, where I was going to live,” Maddow said. “And I got an internship at a think tank at Penn.”
Maddow lived in West Philadelphia and basically ate nothing but Ethiopian food for a few months, though she can’t remember the name of the street: “It was in the 40s and it was one of the tree-named streets.”
In college she was an AIDS activist and focused on healthcare policy, so landing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics seemed liked an ideal fit.
Maddow said her job was to answer the phone. But the internship didn’t last long.
“I was not an additive,” Maddow said. “I don’t think I was an asset to the organization.”
Kiyoshi Kuromiya seen here in 1992, was a gay civil rights activist who helped establish ACT UP Philly. GEORGE REYNOLDS / Staff Photographer, file
Maddow’s activism began when she was still in high school, when she began working at a hospice for people who were dying during the AIDS epidemic.
Still, those few months living in Philadelphia influenced Maddow’s developing political voice. She idolized ACT UP Philly, an activist organization fighting for people with HIV/AIDS, and thinks that gay civil rights activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya is the city’s most overlooked hero for the work he did helping connect people with hard-to-find information about the virus and treatment.
“He saved millions of lives,” Maddow said. “The city needs to build a statue for Kiyoshi Kuromiya.”
Maddow has returned to Philly a number of times over the years, and every time she does, it makes her feel like she’s 19 again. Things have changed — seeing Indego bicycles to rent on street corners after hers was stolen is pretty jarring — but though her time living here was brief, she didn’t hesitate saying, “Philly was really formative for me.”
“The thing I loved about Philly at the time, and that I kind of fell in love with, even before I really knew what to do with it, was the really sparky, edgy, impolite activist spirit,” Maddow said. “I think I’m just a middle-class polite kid who doesn’t like to offend anybody, and Philly kind of shook me out of that a little bit, and made me aspire to edgier things.”
More live events and a new app coming from MS NOW
Nearly 2,000 people attended Thursday night’s event at the Academy of Music. MS NOW
A strong Philly current ran through MS NOW’s event Thursday night, which highlighted the messy history of the American experiment leading up to the country’s 250th anniversary next week.
“My mother’s best friend of 70 years lives here,” Psaki said.
Thursday’s event was part of a larger strategy of engagement at the network after breaking away from NBC and becoming part of Versant, hence the name change from MSNBC to MS NOW. Ratings are up, but the cord-cutting trend is undeniable, so MS NOW is attempting to secure a digital future while it remains a popular TV destination.
The network has now hosted three large fan events since 2024 and another is planned for Sept. 26 ahead of the midterm elections, though further details have not been announced. Attendees in Philly on Thursday night received a free, one-year subscription to MS NOW’s membership product that is set to launch soon. It will act as a streaming platform and online community for the network’s progressive fans and provide access to its biggest stars.
“We’re always looking for ways to connect with our MS NOW community, to meet more viewers where they are, and to engage them in new ways,” said Lauren Peikoff, the network’s executive producer of live events.
Cecil Parker, a Philadelphia musician, said the state of affairs in Washington compelled him to attend Thursday’s event.
“Urgency. That’s the all-encompassing word,” Parker said, who often tunes into MS NOW to get their take on the news. “They have their opinions, but it’s based on the facts. So I dig that.”
Some audience members traveled from as far as Arizona and California to have a chance to hear Maddow and her MS NOW colleagues in person.
Tony Clyburn and his wife, Lisa, drove more than 10 hours from West Columbia, S.C., to take part. A radio host back home, Clyburn said it was inspiring being in a room with people from different walks of life who want what’s best for their neighbors and their country.
“These gatherings are good because they’re as close to a town hall as we can get,” Clyburn said.
WASHINGTON — John Bolton, a former top adviser to President Donald Trump who became one of his most outspoken critics, pleaded guilty Friday morning to mishandling classified information in a case that could send him to prison.
Bolton appeared in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., and admitted to a single charge of illegal retention of classified information over notes he compiled for a book that excoriated Trump.
“I’m sorry for it,” he told Judge Theodore Chuang, who said he would sentence Bolton in October.
Under the plea deal, Bolton could be incarcerated for up to five years, according to the terms of the plea deal described in court. The deal also includes a fine of $2.25 million. If Bolton had gone to trial and lost, he could have faced decades in prison.
When he was first indicted, Bolton sought to frame the case against him as part of a push by the president to misuse the Justice Department to punish his perceived political enemies. The case against Bolton, however, began in the first Trump administration and gained momentum during the Biden administration, as investigators gathered additional evidence.
The original 18-count indictment against Bolton accused him of using personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1,000 pages of notes, which included national defense information, with two family members who did not have security clearances.
The accusations against Bolton center on his notes for The Room Where It Happened, his 2020 memoir about his time as Trump’s national security adviser. Those relatives were Bolton’s wife and daughter, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details of the case that were not in court filings.
According to the indictment, Bolton’s notes revealed that he understood that he was documenting intelligence secrets. One entry began, “The intel briefer said,” while another read, “While in the Situation Room, I learned.”
The first Trump administration fought unsuccessfully to prevent the publication of Bolton’s book, but the criminal investigation ultimately focused not on what was in the published manuscript, but instead on what Bolton wrote in private notes and correspondence.
Unlike some other investigations involving classified information, including charges filed in 2023 against Trump, Bolton was not accused of retaining the secret documents themselves, but rather of keeping diaries and sending emails that mentioned details of his daily work in national security.
Bolton’s emails, however, were later hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran, the indictment said.
“A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021,” according to the filing, “but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser.”
One section of the indictment described Bolton apparently being taunted by his hacker. A message on July 25, 2021, warned, “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email (some of which have been attached).”
The email went on to declare: “This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late.”
A representative for Bolton forwarded the email to the FBI.
Philadelphia officials are planning a major renovation of Market Street’s sidewalks, landscaping, and streetscapes, from Sixth Street toward City Hall.
The announcement of a $2.5 million federal grant to begin the planning and design comes on the heels of the recently completed renovation of the thoroughfare in Old City from Second to Sixth streets. That effort took 18 months of construction and $16 million.
Most recently, the row of storefronts on the 900 block of Market owned by Comcast and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment have begun hosting small pop-up businesses for the summer,as the city celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The Department of Planning and Development is overseeing the revitalization, and the public-private Market East Corridor Advisory Group is helping to craft a vision.
The new $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which the city will match, is limited to planning the streetscape along Market Street between 6th and Juniper Streets.
Construction is years away, said Kelley Yemen, Philadelphia’s director of the Office of Multimodal Planning. Her office is gathering information to evaluate everything from traffic patterns to potential road diets and bike lanes.
“Everything’s on the table at this point,” Yemen said.
Safety remains a primary driver, she said, given that the section of Market Street is situated on the city’s “high-injury network.”
However, she said redesigning the corridor poses unique logistical challenges compared with the recent improvements in Old City.
Market East serves as a major commercial hub with heavy transit use, requiring planners to balance the needs of transit riders, pedestrians, and cyclists.
Additionally, the shallow depth of the underground subway system may constrain surface-level landscaping.
Yemen explained that any trees or plantings must account for the height of the subway ceiling, potentially leading to elevated planters rather than vegetation that’s rooted in the ground.
The city is working with the consulting firm WSP and a team of subconsultants to develop design options.
Yemen anticipates the design will take two to three years, as the city also has to navigate federal environmental reviews.
Though the planning phase is now paid for, the city does not yet have money to fund construction and will likely look to federal or state grants for help in the future.
Public involvement will be a key next step, she said.
The planning commission is expected to launch a broader public engagement push this July to gather community input on the larger Market East revival.
The region may be getting some significant drought relief during the weekend, and then it may be some time before it gets relief from heat that could persist through July Fourth.
Rounds of showers — possible Friday night into Saturday evening when Croatia and Ghana meet in a World Cup match in South Philly — should be more widespread across the region than Monday’s scattershot downpours, said Brian Hurley, senior branch forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center, in College Park, Md.
The severe storms likely would stay well to the south of Washington, D.C. However, “you always have potential” for a few thunderstorms, he said.
Then, after two decent days Sunday and Monday, what is looking like the longest-lasting hot spell of the season to date is due to get underway Tuesday as temperatures head to the mid-90s.
“That’s going to be main story,” said Hurley.
The wild card for the duration would be the possibility of “ring of fire” thunderstorms, forecasters said, which might have temporary cooling effects. Those are storms that form along the boundaries of high-pressure heat domes, and Philly may be near the eastern edge.
How hot might it get next week in Philly?
Expect some tweaking during the next few days, but with “increasing confidence” the National Weather Service in Mount Holly was seeing heat indexes in the triple figures next week.
Come Tuesday, daytime temperatures should be “off to the races,” said Bill Deger, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., which has forecast highs up to 98 degrees late in the workweek.
It also will be steamy, and that will inhibit nighttime cooling as water vapor slows the escape of daytime warning. Readings are unlikely to get lower than the 70s Wednesday through at least next Saturday.
The heat could lap into the following week, said Deger. “It shows some staying power,” he said.
The region already has had 14 days with official temperatures of 90 or higher in 2026, about half the average total for an entire year.
The potential for those ring-of-fire storms would be a wild card, said Hurley and Deger.
Cooling thunderstorms can break heat waves, although they may come with a price. Ring-of-fire storms in July 2020 wrung out as much as 6 inches of rain that set off widespread flooding.
As drought continues, the Philly region could use more rain
Six inches might be a bit over the top, but the region could use more rain to ease the ongoing drought conditions.
Some areas received close to 2 inches on Monday and Tuesday; however, the jackpot zones eluded areas where the dry conditions have been most intense — parts of South Jersey and Chester County.
The entire region remained in some state of drought according to the interagency U.S. Drought Monitor, but Chester County was in “severe drought,” along with small pieces of Bucks and Delaware Counties. In “extreme drought” were all of Cape May County, other Jersey Shore towns, and areas bordering Delaware Bay.
In an analysis based on a network of measuring stations throughout the counties, the weather service’s Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center calculated that Cape May County received less than a half inch of rain, and Cumberland and Salem Counties about 0.6 inches.
In contrast, Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties weighed in with well over an inch.
On the other side of the river, Philly’s total was 1.28 inches, compared with 0.71 for Chesco, which, like New Jersey, is under a state-declared drought emergency.
YANKTON, S.D. — Charl Kleinhaus did not like the direction his country was taking.
A white South African, Kleinhaus said the laws meant to empower Black people after the demise of the racist apartheid system had hurt his mining business. Violence in the country — a scourge affecting everyone, regardless of race — had become too much.
So Kleinhaus considered his options.
Some of his fellow Afrikaners, the ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid, had moved to Germany, but the language barrier was not ideal. He thought about Australia, but decided that moving his family thousands of miles from home would be too hard.
Then, in February of last year, Kleinhaus received what he described as “a message from above.” President Donald Trump had suspended refugee admissions to the United States, but he made an exception for people like Kleinhaus: white Afrikaners who claim they are victims of racial persecution in South Africa.
“It’s now a reverse apartheid,” Kleinhaus said, summing up his grievances about his homeland. “That’s what we are fighting about now.”
In a matter of months, Kleinhaus secured refugee status and moved with his family to the United States, completing a process that can take years under normal circumstances. Now, after a year in the country, he has settled in South Dakota, where he has found part-time work at a car dealership, a farm, and a brickyard while planning his next business.
Kleinhaus is among more than 6,000 South Africans — the vast majority of them white — who have benefited from Trump’s decision to upend America’s refugee program, which for decades had made the United States a sanctuary for people fleeing disaster and persecution.
Charl Kleinhaus secured refugee status and moved with his family to the United States in a matter of months. Terry Ratzlaff
Under Trump, the program has effectively become a whites-only path to life in the United States, a culmination of the president’s long-standing antipathy toward immigrants and his embrace of the concept of “reverse racism” as a guiding principle in his administration.
The president has fought to limit immigration for more than a decade, imposing travel bans on mostly African and Muslim-majority nations and making it much more difficult for people from those nations to obtain green cards. He has railed against affirmative action, and in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year said he believed civil rights-era protections had resulted in white people being “very badly treated.”
But few of Trump’s efforts are as striking as his efforts to turn the refugee program on its head, leaving thousands of people across the world sitting in refugee camps with no chance of entry into the United States, even as he created a workaround for Afrikaners.
The Trump administration has argued that the overhaul of its refugee program is necessary to prioritize refugees who can better assimilate into the United States.
“President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed, and driven off their property across South Africa,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart.”
But critics of the policy who are involved in refugee resettlement say the Trump administration’s priorities have made it impossible to help people who have nowhere else to turn.
“It’s the moral and legal inversion of what this work is about,” said Jason Marks, a senior refugee officer who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security last year when Trump announced the effort to fast-track Afrikaners to the United States. “They are rolling out the red carpet for this group with a clear racial and political agenda at the expense of everyone else.”
‘Too many people’
Kleinhaus acknowledges that moving to the United States from South Africa’s Mpumalanga province was not his “last option.” He left behind resources: a Jaguar sports car, a Range Rover, and what he estimates is property worth at least $300,000. He plans to sell them all to bring in extra money.
But he also says many of his white relatives and friends were no longer safe in South Africa.
White farmers — a population that Trump has spotlighted in public remarks — have indeed been killed in vicious acts of violence in a country that suffers from a high murder rate. But so have Black South Africans and others, and police data does not support the idea that white South Africans are more likely to be targeted than any other group.
Kleinhaus also said his profits were suffering because of racial equity laws.
“You’re not going to get a big contract from a mining company if you’re not Black,” he said. “There’s too many people. How do you divide a small cake between such a big population? Yeah, you cannot.”
He said he felt no guilt about bringing his children and grandson to America to pursue a new life, even as families fleeing conflict in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Ukraine remained walled off.
“You can’t take in those hard-core war people,” said Kleinhaus, whose news feed is full of social media videos and memes promoting the idea that white people are targeted in South Africa. “You can’t put them in a first-world country, you’ll be mad.”
After allowing refugees from around the globe to enter the country for decades, the United States was now trying to “have some type of balance,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this month that U.S. refugee policy must benefit Americans.
“Everything we do has to be geared by the national interest,” Rubio told lawmakers. He said, “It is in our national interest” to allow in people who can “quickly assimilate into society and be successful.”
Rep. Grace Meng (D., N.Y.) questions Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing this month.Demetrius Freeman
Rep. Grace Meng (D., N.Y.) asked why the administration thought other refugees could not assimilate, including Afghans who had helped U.S. soldiers during the war, cleared vetting, and were now stuck in limbo.
“They have assimilated and contribute and pay taxes,” Meng said of Afghan refugees who had moved to her district in Queens, New York. “I think it’s important for America to keep our promise as well,” she added.
Some of the Afrikaners, who are the descendants of Dutch and other European settlers, have not acclimated as smoothly as the administration expected.
During their initial months in the United States, refugees typically can receive some money for housing and food from resettlement organizations who receive federal funding. Those organizations can also help them find work.
But refugees are expected to eventually be self-sufficient. The process is often a difficult one.
Multiple Afrikaners reported delays in receiving financial support from their local resettlement agency, according to complaints obtained by the New York Times. (The names of many of the refugees were omitted from the documents.) One of the families complained about needing to complete Medicaid and Social Security applications on their own. That same family griped about needing to use public transportation, according to the documents.
Another South African relocated to Texas said he felt staffers from the local resettlement agency, which has a Muslim affiliation, had “discriminated” against him as a Christian. The staff members who picked up his parents from the airport were candid about their views of Trump’s changes to the refugee program.
“They told my mother they cannot wait for next election when Trump can leave office as they had a problem with his decision to give South Africans refugee status and how angry they are that only South African refugees are now allowed,” according to the correspondence.
The newly arrived South African also said his family was placed in an apartment that was “dirty, contained mold, and is located in an unsafe area in Fort Worth.”
The complaints by the Afrikaners about their level of assistance also came after the Trump administration made cuts to funding for resettlement agencies and benefits that in the past were made available to new refugees, including food stamps.
At least three Afrikaners made the return after being settled in states including Minnesota, Idaho, and Illinois, according to government documents. Some had sick relatives back home. One Afrikaner said the process had “occurred quickly” and “she had not thoroughly thought through the process.”
“I think some of them are finding that actually it’s not an easy life to be a refugee,” said Bryony Fox, a lecturer at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, who researches forced displacement.
Claims of genocide
South African officials strongly dispute claims by Trump that Afrikaners are being targeted in a “genocide.”
During apartheid, which ended in 1994, the government denied Black South Africans the right to own prime agricultural land. That meant that almost all of the country’s large-scale commercial farmers were white, and that remains so to this day.
South Africa’s Commission for Employment Equity found that white people made up 61% of top management posts in 2024, while they are only 7.5% of the population. Black South Africans are also unemployed at far higher rates than their white peers, a disparity that has not improved over time.
To address the disparities, the African National Congress government has instituted racial equity laws that incentivize companies to have Black ownership and leadership. That Black Economic Empowerment initiative has prompted intense scrutiny from the Trump administration, as well as from Afrikaners fleeing to the United States who say it has harmed their businesses.
Kleinhaus said such policies make him as a white man feel targeted by the South African government. He said that he had struggled to keep thieves off his property and that his relatives had been the victims of violence, although he said getting into the specifics made him too emotional.
In his experience, white people are portrayed as “the problems in the economy” and “the privileged ones.”
“There’s no such thing as that,” Kleinhaus said. “Most whites have lost a lot.”
Fox said there was no denying the violence in South Africa.
“That is our biggest problem,” she said. “But it is not targeted. It is not systematic targeting.”
She said criminals had attacked farms because they “have resources that communities are seeking.”
Trump has echoed fringe claims about a white genocide in South Africa for years, going back to his first term. Last year, in a stunning confrontation in the Oval Office, Trump lectured the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, about his own country. Ramaphosa implored Trump to listen to “the voices of South Africans.”
The State Department does not break down its refugee data by race, but it has allowed in more than 6,600 refugees this fiscal year. All but three were from South Africa.
Trump’s aides have defended the program by saying that other racial minorities in majority-Black South Africa are welcome to apply for the refugee program.
South Africa also has minority populations of people of Indian descent, white people of British heritage, and mixed-race people — and a few individuals from those communities have been processed through Trump’s refugee program. But refugee resettlement officials say nearly all of those who have been accepted are white, and government documents confirm that the administration has prioritized resettling white Afrikaners.
Why white South Africans?
Long before Trump created the refugee program, many white South Africans traveled to the United States — from the Midwest to the Mississippi Delta — on temporary visas to work as seasonal farmers.
Since 2019, Kobus Van Den Berg has been traveling to and from the United States to plant soybeans and fertilize fields in North Dakota to save money for his family back home in South Africa. He agrees that crime is an issue in South Africa, but he pushed back on the notion that white South Africans are being singled out.
“They’ll attack anybody,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what color or race you are.”
He has watched as Afrikaners have come into the United States in recent months with refugee status and a pathway to citizenship, even as he has spent years navigating a complicated immigration system with the hopes of obtaining a green card.
“Why is it so easy for this other Afrikaner from South Africa to come over here?” Van Den Berg said. “The thing that blows everyone’s mind today is, why is it specifically white South Africans?”
Critics of the Trump administration say the answer lies not just in Trump’s long-standing embrace of the Afrikaners’ cause, or the administration’s desire for “assimilation,” but in his stance toward refugees more broadly.
Sharif Aly, the president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, said the policy shows an “indifference to the plight of nonwhite refugees.”
It is difficult to ascertain how rigorously the administration is vetting the South Africans. In the past, the process has been time-consuming, with agents demanding criminal records, medical records, and even social media posts.
The Trump administration has said it would deny immigration requests for those with antisemitic or “anti-American” posts on their social media accounts, but Kleinhaus was welcomed even though he had made antisemitic comments on social media. In April 2023, the X user @charlkleinhaus wrote in a now-deleted post that Jews were “untrustworthy” and “a dangerous group” and that “they are not Gods chosen.”
Kleinhaus said his grandmother was Jewish, he was not an antisemitic person and he had written the post in error while he was taking medication for a kidney stone. He also shared other posts that had been written by others.
During his processing, he said, he signed off on administration vetting of his social media accounts and no one brought up any problems.
‘Leaving everything behind’
Over breakfast at a local diner, the Fryn’ Pan Family Restaurant, Kleinhaus said he missed some aspects of his life in South Africa, including “the people, my workers, my friends, and family.”
But he also appreciates “these advantages that I’ve got here to do things I can do just as a white person” and not needing to worry about laws requiring him to sell a percentage of equity of his mining company to Black shareholders in South Africa “because they were here first or whatever the story can be.”
He said he was focused on working and contributing to the United States.
He said he did not complain when he, his son, daughter, and grandson were initially placed in one hotel room in Buffalo, N.Y. He soon identified a farmer in Yankton, S.D., who had hired seasonal workers from South Africa for years and was looking for more help.
Now, his daughter works at a flower shop in the small town of Yankton. His son works at another farm and his grandson has learned English quickly after knowing only Afrikaans.
And he has found part-time work at a car dealership and at a brickyard while he plans how to start his next business. He occasionally takes his grandson fishing in this area known for the Lewis and Clark trail on the weekends.
“I just want my kids to be successful,” he said.
Kleinhaus hopes he can convince other relatives to join him soon in America. He said he knows he cannot simply go back and visit, because that would undermine his claims of persecution.
“I’m leaving everything behind,” he said. “When you accept the refugee thing, it’s not a thing like, ‘I’ll be back in two weeks; I’m going on holiday.’ It’s nothing like that. You’re saying, ‘It’s done. I’m not going back.’”
As final grades post, lockers empty and end-of-year celebrations draw to a close, anxiety about the future looms. For many children in Philadelphia a lottery determined where they’ll head to school next year. The city is far from alone in adopting a practice that one online forum likened to “wading through some kind of toxic gas.” The goal, broadly speaking, is to ensure that any student anywhere can benefit from excellent schools despite entrenched housing segregation in many of America’s cities.
Yet, despite the endorsement of the Nobel Prize committee, the question of whether these lotteries actually enhance equity is complicated.
Consider the case of Washington D.C., where 76% of the public school system is Black and Hispanic, 43% of students are designated as “at risk” academically and 15% are English language learners. For more than a decade, the city has embraced what is called the “common lottery.” Families enter for a variety of reasons, including seeking a particular type of education—dual language immersion, or an arts-centric curriculum—or even looking for a school in close proximity to a caregiver’s workplace. For some students, the lottery has offered a ticket to a superior educational experience than the one at their neighborhood school. The history informing the adaptation of the common lottery, however, suggests that such a fix can both promote and evade equity, serving as a bandaid to old, not fully healed wounds.
Over a half century ago, Washingtonians came together to rethink how place determined the quality of education. In 1967, local activist Julius Hobson successfully sued the superintendent of schools for discriminating against Black and poor public school children. Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright, who previously desegregated schools in New Orleans, ordered multiple remedies, including boundary revisions to foster racial and socioeconomic integration.
To fulfill one of the court’s mandates, in February 1968, a group of 35 civic-minded residents from every section of the city formed a committee to redraw how the district set attendance boundaries. After several weeks of deliberation, the committee produced six maps and settled on two, one for junior high schools and one for high schools, to present to the board of education. On May 8, 1968, the nine-member board approved the changes, affecting approximately 9,000 of the District’s 146,000 students.
Yet, the ink had barely dried on the new maps when the school board considered additional revisions to school assignments. Enrollment patterns explained some of the changes, such as long-awaited school construction to alleviate overcrowding. But other changes looked more like carving out loopholes, blurring the lines between families’ legitimate appeals and race and class biases.
In July 1969, the school board laid out the list of reasons that might justify a student transferring from their assigned school to one outside of their assigned geographic boundary. They included “medical reasons,” “diplomatic requests” and “gross inconvenience to parents and/or family routine.”
The board also unanimously approved shifting 21 students, 18 white and three Black, from Gordon Junior High, located in Georgetown, to Alice Deal Junior High in upper Northwest, a historically white and affluent area of the city.In 1970, Gordon Junior High was only 53% white, whereas Alice Deal was 60% white. School board member Albert Rosenfield proposed the change on behalf of his well-to-do, well-connected constituents. For Rosenfield, the city “must have a tax base,” and appeasing a few families, some with seats in Congress, could prevent their exit and help sustain the city’s coffers.
Concerned white parents who believed the transfers “enhance[d] segregation” quickly sued the board, and the court agreed.
Yet, the legal victory didn’t stop the school board from implementing quieter administrative measures which enabled parents to justify transferring their children to schools outside of their assigned boundaries to alleviate a purported burden. For the 1971-1972 school year, families submitted 700 appeals at the elementary school level and 1,639 for junior high and high school. The district approved 90% of transfer requests for elementary school students and over half of those coming from secondary students.
And so, by the 1980s, even though the boundary changes were supposed to help equalize educational opportunities regardless of one’s address, a system of widespread exemptions had created had made that promise illusory for many families. For example, in the spring of 1983, a third of Alice Deal’s 987 students were from outside of the school’s geographic boundaries. Their families had successfully navigated the sysem, which now determined which students could get exemptions on a first come, first served basis. Parents could even claim that “curriculum offerings” necessitated a transfer. This approach to fairness spurred competition for entrance into some prestigious schools. In 1986, approximately 175 parents assembled overnight outside of district offices for a chance to claim a coveted spot in their school of choice.
Over the next 40 years, families’ ability to navigate the public school system only grew more complicated: controversial school closures, expanding citywide (or magnet) school options and the emergence of charter schools all affected how students could pursue a public education. Recognizing the burden to families and school administrators, in 2014, D.C. Public Schools and most charter schools turned to a common lottery to streamline the application process. (That same year, the district also accepted recommendations for boundary revisions, the first since 1968.)
The lottery was a well-intentioned step toward expanding educational opportunity—and it has worked for many families. For the 2026-2027 school year, 74% of the 20,987 families who tested their luck received good news: a chance to enroll at one of their selected schools. And in recent years, the district’s new Equitable Access option gives students who are “at-risk” academically a higher chance of success on lottery day.
Of course, none of this matters for some families; indeed, according to the D.C. Policy Center, residents in the city’s Jackson-Reed High School feeder pattern were the least likely to use the lottery, opting instead to attend their in-boundary school assignment, or a private school. But for those who want, or need, the lottery, as the state superintendent remarks, it provides a chance to take advantage of “the strength of so many D.C. education programs and the meaningful learning experiences they create.”
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Still, luck isn’t a guaranteed pathway to equity. The lottery made no matches for one quarter of this year’s applicants, who may or may not get off of waitlists.
The good news is the district has witnessed the dividends of more systemic efforts to nurture students. In math, researchers recently crowned the nation’s capital first among 38 states for “academic recovery” following the Covid-19 pandemic; and the same goes for reading performance among 35 states. But the work continues. As the city prepares to search for new leadership over D.C. Public Schools, the district is still chasing pre-pandemic benchmarks, and despite evidence of progress, nationally, math (ranked 27th) and reading (ranked 45th) are two subjects ripe for growth.
Philadelphia public schools, which also offers a lottery, is currently bracing for school closures and hundreds of teacher and staff cuts in response to a budget deficit. Lotteries can be useful additions to the equity landscape, but they can only do so much to reach the most vulnerable students.
Erica Sterling is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.
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.
Russian air defenses intercepted 660 Ukrainian drones in a major nighttime attack on 12 Russian regions as well as the Russia-held Crimean peninsula, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday.
It appeared to be one of the biggest drone attacks on Russia and the illegally annexed Crimea since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago. The previous biggest Ukrainian attack over the past year was 556 drones on May 17.
In an effort to turn the tables on Russia’s grinding war of attrition, Ukrainian long-range drones have for months been battering targets, including oil production and energy facilities, behind the front line and deep inside Russia. The campaign has choked Russian fuel supplies and military deliveries, stalling Moscow’s efforts on the battlefield, Western officials and analysts say, and heaped pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Initial damage reports from Russia after the overnight attack provided scant information. Russia’s Defense Ministry usually doesn’t say what was targeted in Ukraine’s drone attacks, nor does it detail any damage.
Ukraine’s Security Service said it used drones to strike Russian navy ships and air defense radars in Kerch, an important port city in Crimea.
The targets were two reconnaissance and mine-laying ships, the Volga and the Vyatka, and the cargo-passenger ferry Petropavlovsk, the agency said, claiming that the strikes started a large fire. The claim could not be independently verified.
Successful drone attacks hearten Ukraine
The major attack came hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X that he had ordered “a 40-day influence operation,” believed to mean an escalation of attacks, aimed at “compelling (Russia) to end the war” after U.S. peace efforts over the past year yielded no breakthrough.
The successful strikes, including hitting targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, have buoyed Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said he got further promises of foreign support when he attended a recent summit of G7 leaders, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, and that the promised aid will help Ukraine step up its effort to force Putin to the negotiating table.
A NATO summit next month could be another key moment in beefing up Ukraine’s military.
A Russian chemical plant is reportedly hit
In the Tula region just south of Moscow, a private house was damaged by the attack and a woman was wounded, Tula Gov. Dmitry Milyaev said in an online statement, as reports of damage caused by the attack began to emerge.
He also said a power line was damaged and an unspecified industrial facility in the city of Novomoskovsk.
Russian independent online outlet Astra reported that a chemical plant and a hydroelectric plant in Novomoskovsk were attacked and caught fire. The Associated Press couldn’t independently verify the report, and there was no official confirmation.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also reported that 47 Ukrainian drones were downed as they flew toward the Russian capital. He did not report any casualties or damage.
Ukraine says 2 civilians were killed in Russian attacks
Two people were killed and seven others injured in Russian attacks on the northeastern Kharkiv region over the previous 24 hours, regional head Oleh Syniehubov said Friday.
Russian forces struck the city of Kharkiv and 16 other settlements across the region using guided aerial bombs and drones of various types, Syniehubov said.
Ukraine’s defenses overnight stopped 174 of 189 Russian drones, the Ukrainian air force said. However, four of seven Iskander-M ballistic missiles that were fired got through air defenses and struck various locations, it said.
Ukrainian officials reported damage to energy facilities, homes and other civilian infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv, the southern Odesa and Zaporizhzhia regions, and Sumy in the northeast. At least six people were wounded, according to authorities.
No Russian military buildup seen on border with Belarus, Ukraine says
Russia is expanding several of its military sites deep inside Belarus, but there is no buildup of forces near the Ukrainian border, a State Border Guard Service spokesman said Friday.
Russia launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine from Belarus, which borders both countries, and Kyiv has kept a close watch on developments there during the war.
Ukrainian intelligence units have detected no grouping or reinforcement of Russian units, equipment or personnel close to the border, spokesman Andrii Demchenko said in remarks to Ukrainian television.
However, Russia has a growing number of training grounds, bases and other sites deeper inside the country, according to intelligence units.
President Donald Trump shocked transit officials last year when he said that he would seize control of the long-delayed renovation of Penn Station, one of the busiest and most maligned transit hubs in the world.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York state agency that had been in charge of the project and frequently found itself at odds with Washington, offered a surprising response: It’s all yours.
Now, federal officials may need the cooperation of that same agency, which controls a large portion of the space, if it intends to keep its promise to break ground on the Penn Station revamp by the end of next year. And the partnership is not off to a good start.
On Monday, Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chief executive, wrote a scathing letter to Amtrak, the national rail company that owns Penn Station, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, whose overtures he described as a lot of “blah-blah” and “gamesmanship.”
“When the Trump administration announced it was taking over the reconstruction project, we were cautiously optimistic, despite the typically gratuitous (and fact-free) snipes USDOT and Amtrak took at the MTA,” he said. “But the process since then has been simply bizarre.”
At the center of the dispute is a web of tangled stakeholders. While Amtrak owns Penn Station, the MTA is its busiest tenant, accounting for two-thirds of the riders who pass through each day. They use it to board the subway system and the Long Island Rail Road, both of which are operated by the MTA New Jersey’s rail network, NJ Transit, also runs service there. The labyrinthine station sits beneath Madison Square Garden, the arena controlled by James Dolan, a close friend of Trump’s.
Amtrak announced in April 2025 that it would proceed with a plan to make room for a new, classically inspired train hall, but has yet to disclose the cost. Sean Duffy, the U.S. transportation secretary, has said that the federal government could spend $8 billion on the project.
Lieber said that the renovation plan had the “appearance of impropriety” because the process to select a developer was opaque. The winning proposal involves a plan to buy and demolish a portion of the arena called the Infosys Theater, and replace it with a grand entrance on Eighth Avenue. Amtrak has yet to disclose what it might pay Dolan for the privilege.
In October, Amtrak sent the MTA a “collaboration agreement” that it said would help expedite renovation decisions by granting the federal government more oversight. But the MTA has not signed on to the arrangement, arguing that the deal could compromise an existing and much stronger contract — a prepaid lease that gives the agency more latitude in station design decisions. That pact doesn’t expire for 160 years.
Lieber said that the agreement offered last year by Amtrak would limit the MTA’s ability to influence design decisions, constrain the ways it communicates changes to riders and cede other rights.
“Not interested,” he wrote.
Lieber’s letter this week was a response to a missive from Andy Byford, a former head of the MTA’s transit division. He had been nicknamed “train daddy” by his supporters because of popular changes he put in place. Byford left the transit agency after a public dispute with Andrew Cuomo, who was governor at the time.
But Byford, who has occasionally had a tense relationship with Lieber, is now in charge of Trump’s federal takeover of the Penn Station redesign.
“It is disingenuous for some to continue to assert that MTA has been ‘frozen out,’ ‘sidelined,’ or ‘excluded’ by Amtrak. Rather, it has been MTA’s repeated choice over the past year to opt out of participating in the project,” he wrote in a letter sent to reporters Sunday — a day before the MTA received it.
Like most landlord-tenant relationships, this one is fraught. The MTA in October blamed Amtrak for delaying by three years an expansion of railroad service in the Bronx, because it did not grant enough access to their shared infrastructure. In April, Amtrak sued the MTA for refusing to let some of its new trains ride on the transit agency’s tracks. (A judge sided with the MTA.) And for months, the two groups have clashed over the repair schedule for tunnels under the East River that provide service to Penn Station.
Wednesday, after an MTA board meeting, Lieber said that he was willing to work with Amtrak, but not at the expense of protections guaranteed in their lease, such as the right to challenge construction decisions that could affect LIRR service.
“The idea that we should give away rock-solid rights in favor of a lick and a promise, a hope and a prayer that they might agree to do what we think are the important things to do, is not realistic,” he said.
Byford said in a statement that Amtrak had already made amendments to the agreement, and insisted that the contract would not “water down” the MTA’s lease. NJ Transit has already signed a version of the pact.
MTA officials have raised concerns that the Penn Station redevelopment plan, led by the companies Halmar and Skanska and designed by the architecture firm PAU, could generate costs that might be borne by New York transit riders.
In an interview Wednesday, Byford insisted that the plan would not require ticket surcharges or fare increases for passengers who use Penn Station.
“That’s not how budgets work,” he said, calling that fear unfounded. But he left open possibly finding other ways to fully pay for the project.
The MTA’s reluctance to sign the agreement may cause friction with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who effectively controls the agency. She has said that she supports Trump’s takeover of Penn Station, provided that the cost is not passed on to New Yorkers.
Hochul received a presentation last week from Penn Transformation Partners, the private consortium of developers and architects that the federal government selected to lead the redesign, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
Sean Butler, a spokesperson for Hochul, said the governor believed that delivering a better Penn Station “is too important to not work collaboratively and constructively with all partners.”
When asked about the MTA’s response, Byford said that he liked Lieber, and that the two of them had a good working relationship when they led different divisions of the agency.
“This is just a professional disagreement,” he said.
But Wednesday, in a statement attributed to Byford, Amtrak said that the redesign of Penn Station will continue, with or without the MTA’s help.
“We don’t need them to sign; we will proceed regardless,” Amtrak said. “Gov. Hochul gets that, the MTA does not, it would appear.”
