Two images, which were created by Populous, the global design firm responsible for the arena’s conception, showed fans attending basketball and hockey games in the new state-of-the-art digs. But somefans say the Flyers’ rendering was missing one key detail: female fans. What ensued was a Where’s Waldo? level of analysis by people on the internet. The Flyers have sinceupdated the rendering.
The original Sixers rendering had a handful of what appeared to be female-presenting fans, wearing crossbody purses over their jerseys, with long hairstyles and ponytails. The Flyers version was more ambiguous. There appeared to be some women sitting toward the top of the image, in clusters across the stairs, but none wearing Flyers gear.
A Populous spokesperson said the company accepted responsibility for the oversight and worked quickly to update the rendering as soon as it became aware of the issue.
“The website now reflects the updated image,” the spokesperson said.
Camille Barrière was one of the initial critics who pointed out the apparent lack of women via an X post. Barrière, who lives in Paris, studied architecture and is pursuing her master’s degree inmedia design at the School of Design Nantes Atlantique, with a focus on the delegitimization of women and non-male sports fans.
When the renderings came out, Barrière saidonline that it was “new source material” for her thesis. Her post has been viewed nearly 200,000 times on X and has since spread to other social media platforms, particularly Reddit and Instagram among women’s sports pages.
Some fans worry the lack of visibly female fans in the original rendering was more than an innocent mistake and is actually indicative of the male-centric way sports fandoms are still stereotypically viewed. Others say it’s not that serious and this much intense dialogue based off a rendering is laughable.
“As a woman, I’m hyper aware of the amount of men in public spaces, and it’s for that reason that the image struck me. I continued searching and couldn’t find a single woman in Flyers gear in that picture,” Barrière told The Inquirer.
no women in the flyers render …. new source material for my masters thesis just dropped https://t.co/FppeyyaJEO
Creating architectural renderings is not one size fits all and the process can vary considerably, but the final product can help represent the future of a space and who it belongs to, says Rashida Ng, an architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
“I wouldn’t presume to know how or why the particular Flyers image was produced, or suggest that the omission was intentional,” she said. “But something can be unintentional and still be meaningful. If an image of a major public venue inadvertently leaves out a substantial part of the public, I think it’s worth asking how that happened.”
The Gist and Togethxr, two popular women-founded sports media brands, called out the original renderings on Instagram. Reports show women are one of the fastest-growing audiences in sports.
“They’re buying season tickets, filling arenas, creating fan communities, and shaping sports culture across every major league. The future of sports already includes women,” the Gist wrote in its post. “The renderings should too.”
Ng says she sees the rendering debacle as a “teachable moment.”
“Design is not neutral. The spaces we create — and the images we use to imagine and communicate them — both reflect and shape ideas about who belongs, who is welcome, and whose experiences matter,” she said. “That doesn’t mean every design decision or omission is intentional, but it does mean that designers have a responsibility to think critically about the worlds their work helps to envision.”
Thursday morning, the Flyers updated the rendering on its website with a new version, one that added many new visibly female fans.
As for Barrière, she’s shocked that a non-fan’s observation from across the world sparked discussion.
“If my silly tweet that was just meant for my 40 followers can initiate a discussion on the issue, then I’m all for it,” she said. “I think inclusivity in hockey spaces, whether online or in real life, still has a long way to go, and calling out the teams directly is one of the ways we can help move the conversation forward in a positive direction.”
And thinking about those women fans is particularly pertinent for the new arena — it’s also the future home of Philadelphia’s new WNBA franchise.
East Norriton police are searching for the driver of a vehicle who fatally struck a pedestrian on Labor Day weekend, then fled.
Ricardo Baptiste, 29, was struck Sunday just after 9 p.m. as he walked along West Germantown Pike near Whitehall Road, police said Thursday.
The initial vehicle that hit Baptiste, a Lansdowne resident, pushed him into the opposite lane of traffic, where he was struck by a tractor trailer, police said. Medics transported him to nearby Jefferson Einstein Montgomery Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Police say the driver of that first vehicle did not remain at the scene, and they believe the person behind the wheel may have been driving drunk.
Baptiste’s family told investigators he had just left Jefferson Einstein, which is a few hundred yards away. He was being treated for an unrelated issue.
He leaves behind a 3-year-old daughter, and worked for a time as a kindergarten teacher, according to his family.
Anyone with information on the crash is asked to contact the Montgomery County Detective Bureau at 610-278-3368.
Twenty five years ago, Osama bin Laden led the planning of al-Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, from a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, where he lived as their guest.
Now, the Taliban rule over Afghanistan once again, trying to present a more modern face to the world.
But despite the veneer, the Taliban have not changed their ideology, and armed groups, including dozens of al-Qaeda members, remain in Afghanistan. Many of the conditions that made the Sept. 11 attacks possible remain.
The Taliban outlasted the U.S. war to oust them and are now ruling over 45 million Afghans. They use the latest iPhones to contact European and U.S. diplomats. They travel to the Persian Gulf and Turkey, and promote trade with Uzbekistan and India. Their fighters now patrol Afghanistan’s cities, some using abandoned U.S. military gear.
And when Taliban officials receive foreign visitors in their gilded offices in Kabul, the capital, they insist that they want peaceful relations with the world. They repeat the commitments they made in 2020 during peace talks with the United States, not to allow another major attack to take root on Afghan soil.
Marwa, an Afghan girl, begging on a recent evening in an area near Ziyafat. Half of Afghanistan’s population needs humanitarian aid.TOMAS MUNITA
“We consider the chapter of war to have come to an end,” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in a recent interview in Kabul.
But the United States, the European Union and most other governments are not ready to trust them.
Their promises about security are similar to the ones Mullah Mohammad Omar, then the Taliban’s leader, made months before 9/11, when he told a journalist that bin Laden “does not operate against anyone from the soil of Afghanistan.”
The Taliban have imposed increasingly severe orders on how women should dress in Afghanistan. They remain excluded from most public spaces and can’t work most jobs.TOMAS MUNITA
Al-Qaeda and other militant groups remain in Afghanistan, although without a leader as powerful as bin Laden and without their past influence over the Taliban.
And there is a troubling intelligence vacuum. Security officials and diplomats acknowledge that they lack the full picture of what is happening inside Afghanistan. It has again become a dark room where, they warn, new threats could emerge unnoticed.
Sherin Jan Haidari, 55, praying in Wardak Province, west of Kabul, at the grave of his two nephews and niece killed by Afghan soldiers during the U.S.-led war.TOMAS MUNITA
What security means now
In conversation, Afghans often describe life in their country by what it is no longer: at war. Roads are safe. Mining deals are welcome. The sound of gunfire is less common. Civilians are no longer in constant danger of being killed by drones or crossfire, though the threat from unexploded devices remains. Kabul has seen an influx of new money and new restaurants that mimic the glitter of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
That is the Taliban’s message: Calm, not chaos, permeates Afghanistan.
But that is only one part of the story. Extremist armed groups still have a home in Afghanistan, according to the United States, China, Russia, and the United Nations.
The militant threat in Afghanistan is much less significant and visible than in the years leading up to 9/11, experts and security officials say, when up to 30,000 militants and fighters were in the country.
Still, United Nations experts estimate that 15,000 to 20,000 militants are scattered among about 20 groups in Afghanistan. Russia says they could number up to 23,000.
Al-Qaeda has only a few dozen members, according to estimates from the United Nations and security experts, but some of them live freely in Kabul. The Afghan authorities have issued national identity cards to the leadership of al-Qaeda’s South Asian branch, according to the United Nations’ group of experts monitoring terrorist networks.
Thousands of Islamic State group militants also roam the rugged borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Most numerous are the thousands of militants from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, known as the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, who navigate the porous border to stage attacks on Pakistani security forces. Security experts and officials attribute a sharp increase in attacks on Pakistan to the permissive environment provided by the Afghan Taliban since 2021.
Though in far lower numbers than in the 1990s, foreign fighters have also recently traveled to Afghanistan from Syria and Somalia.
The Taliban in Afghanistan deny backing the Pakistani Taliban but privately say that they could not rein in the group even if they wanted to.
Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States under President Donald Trump, and the United States has accused the Taliban of breaking their counterterrorism promises. Even China, long a staunch supporter of pragmatic engagement with the Taliban, has urged the group to “resolutely eliminate all terrorist forces.” The European Union wants it “to do more to convince the world that Afghanistan is not a potential threat.”
Intelligence diplomacy
The continued presence of thousands of militants is one of the main reasons for the Taliban’s continued isolation from the rest of the world. Most security analysts believe that they pose a threat mainly to the region, not the West, but al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group still promote a global ideology.
The Taliban claim they work closely with foreign intelligence services to fend off the Islamic State’s group’s Afghanistan affiliate. A senior Afghan intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, called this “intelligence diplomacy.”
The two groups are enemies because the affiliate adheres to an extremist jihadi ideology that views the Taliban as apostates for accommodating religious minorities and seeking international engagement. The affiliate claimed responsibility for the attack near the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians. It has repeatedly targeted Shiite communities in Afghanistan and has claimed deadly attacks in Kabul and Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, this year.
The Taliban have deployed special forces teams to infiltrate areas controlled by the Islamic State group, according to Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London who follows militant groups in the region.
Afghans praying in the central square of Gardez, eastern Afghanistan, near an American Humvee from the war. The writing on the vehicle reads in part, “I hope the tower of martyrdom will stay high and shining in the sky.”TOMAS MUNITA
Experts and security officials say the affiliate no longer has the capacity to mount a large-scale assault. They attribute this to the work of the Taliban and Pakistan, as well as a broader loss of momentum by the group.
“Kabul, to its credit, is waging a fierce armed struggle against Islamic State,” Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s former defense minister and now the secretary of its Security Council, said this year.
The Taliban’s relationship with al-Qaeda is of another nature.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have in recent years called Afghanistan a “nursing home” for al-Qaeda’s senior members and defined the group’s threat from the country as being at its “lowest point” in decades.
But its influence persists.
Al-Qaeda never abandoned the Taliban during their 20-year insurgency, and the Taliban have not abandoned al-Qaeda in power.
A few dozen Qaeda members remain in Kabul and along the Pakistani border, training the Pakistani Taliban, according to the United Nations’ monitoring group on terrorist networks.
(Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, was killed in a U.S. drone strike on his balcony in Kabul in 2022.)
“The exact role of al-Qaeda Afghanistan? It’s very hard to say,” said Colin Smith, the coordinator of the U.N. group, which collects information from more than 40 intelligence agencies for its biannual reports.
Taliban soldiers paraded in Kabul with an effigy of President Donald Trump on Aug. 15, in celebration of their return to power five years earlier. The soldiers later stabbed the effigy.TOMAS MUNITA
In April, al-Qaeda declared support for the Pakistani Taliban and renewed its endorsement of the Taliban government in Kabul, hailing the group as “a modern role model.” By backing the Taliban, al-Qaeda is buying time and space in Afghanistan, Giustozzi said.
Cumbersome allies
The Taliban’s relationship with militant groups keeps alive a long-running debate: Are the Taliban an insurgent group engaged in statecraft; a state-ruling entity that hasn’t shed its insurgent past; or a mix of both?
That uncertainty reflects the balancing act at the heart of the Taliban’s survival. Allowing Afghanistan to serve as a launchpad for international terrorism is not in the Taliban’s interest — as they learned after 9/11. But out of hospitality, ideological zeal and a lack of resources, they have so far been unable, and in part unwilling, to expel them.
The Pakistani Taliban are forcing the Taliban to face the consequences. The two fought side by side during the U.S.-led war, and the Pakistani Taliban now expect a return on investment: support to establish a similar stronghold in Pakistan.
If the Taliban withdraw support to their Pakistani counterparts, they risk seeing more of their disgruntled fighters join the Pakistani Taliban. Most of the Taliban’s rank and file now control checkpoints and patrol cities. The Pakistani Taliban are offering a new jihad, right next door.
“We sacrificed our generation to bring peace,” said Farhad Sangari, the Taliban commander of a special forces unit in Kabul, on a recent evening as he led a traffic patrol. He added, “I miss the memories of jihad and the front line.”
Many experts and security officials also fear that the vast network of religious schools that has expanded across Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover is teaching a violent, expansionist agenda.
“How many hundreds of thousands of men have been exposed to the Taliban ideology glorifying jihad?” said Michael Semple, a longtime Afghanistan expert at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Afghans are now living with a situation they haven’t faced in decades. They are somewhat safe at home, but Afghanistan is once again exporting insecurity.
The return of gunfire
Whatever its exact nature, the relationship between the Taliban and militant groups now threatens to destabilize Afghanistan.
Fed up with relentless attacks from the Pakistani Taliban, the Pakistani military has retaliated with dozens of airstrikes on Afghan security and civilian infrastructure this year, including in Kabul.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, said his country’s leadership had concluded Pakistan’s domestic security would not improve until it “sorted out” the Taliban. Over the past few months, Taliban officials have grown increasingly concerned about the possibility of a Pakistani-backed attempt at regime change in Afghanistan.
Anti-Taliban resistance groups waiting in the wings now see an opportunity. Three groups, led by former members of the U.S.-backed Afghan military, have claimed responsibility for more than 50 attacks on Taliban officials, checkpoints and buildings across Afghanistan since July.
The leader of one of them, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the attacks, described them in an interview as targets of opportunity, aimed at cracking the veneer of security that the Taliban have so far maintained.
The scattered attacks do not yet pose a regime-ending threat, but at least two local officials have been killed by anti-Taliban forces in recent weeks.
They are another reminder that in Afghanistan, war is not yet a distant memory.
Tal, Oren, and Alon Alexander, three prominent brothers convicted of running a decadeslong sex-trafficking scheme in New York earlier this year, have enlisted lawyer Alan Dershowitz in their apparent pursuit of a pardon from President Donald Trump.
They retained him in March 2025, nearly 11 months before their trial began in New York federal court, and since then have paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to financial documents obtained by The New York Times.
Those documents include a copy of a check for $250,000, as well as a wire transfer receipt and an invoice from Dershowitz requesting an additional $250,000.
Dershowitz confirmed to the Times that he was working for the Alexander family, but said he had not yet discussed options for a pardon with them, describing his role as a consultant on “legal, constitutional, and sentencing issues.” According to a letter reviewed by the Times, written by Dershowitz to the mother of the men, his work also includes pursuing options of “executive clemency and judicial reversal.”
He had not discussed their case with President Donald Trump, Dershowitz said, and although he had visited the brothers in prison and held regular conversations with their criminal defense lawyers, he had not yet explored avenues for a pardon with them. The brothers each face a minimum of 15 years and a potential life sentence. Their sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 6.
“My work has been purely on legal issues completely,” Dershowitz said in a phone interview, but added, “I would be happy to provide consultation services on any aspect.” Dershowitz said he took on the case because he knew Shlomi and Orly Alexander, the brothers’ parents. He confirmed that he was working on behalf of all three brothers.
“I saw that they were facing very serious consequences,” he said. “I don’t ever turn down a case based on the government’s allegations.”
Lawyers for the Alexander brothers, in a joint statement, said they were not aware of any efforts to contact the White House on behalf of their clients. “Our sole focus has been on preparing for sentencing,” they wrote.
Dershowitz, 88, a high-profile lawyer, has ties to Trump, having helped to defend him during his first impeachment trial, where he was acquitted, and advising him at times on foreign policy.
In Trump’s first term, Dershowitz was credited with shaping more of the president’s clemency decisions than almost any other advocate. He played a role in at least 12 clemency grants, including two pardons, which wipe away most consequences of convictions, and 10 commutations, which reduce prison sentences.
He was sought after by other clemency seekers looking for an edge in a system in which connections to the president are seen as a way to skip to the front of the line. Lawyers and lobbyists with ties to the president have charged steep rates to people seeking to avoid or shorten prison sentences.
Dershowitz, who once described himself as a “liberal Democrat” but announced this year that he was joining the Republican Party, has also provided advice to others seeking clemency this year. He counseled OneTaste, a wellness company described by critics as a sex cult. The company’s founder and director of sales were convicted of forced labor conspiracy last year, and they are in federal prison in Brooklyn.
It is not clear if Dershowitz — whose decadeslong career has included representing Jeffrey Epstein — has had as much success in helping to secure clemency grants in the second Trump administration.
The brothers — Tal Alexander, 40, and the twins Oren and Alon Alexander, 39, who were raised in Florida — have their own connections in Trump’s orbit. Oren Alexander and Tal Alexander, who had been among the highest-earning real estate brokers in the country before their arrest, represented Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in their purchase of a $24 million Florida mansion in 2021.
The Alexanders began exploring avenues for seeking pardons before they were found guilty of sex trafficking and assault against both women and girls.
Last year, a person close to the brothers made inquiries with the Tzedek Association, a Jewish group that has been influential in shaping Trump’s clemency grants and criminal justice policies. The Tzedek Association, which was involved in at least one commutation granted this year, worked with Dershowitz on clemency issues during the first Trump administration.
Less than three months after their arrest, the documents show, the Alexander family paid Dershowitz’s retainer of $250,000. The Times reviewed a photograph of a check dated March 5, 2025, made out to Dershowitz and signed by Orly Alexander. The Times also reviewed a receipt from a wire transfer showing a transaction on that same day of $500,000, with a handwritten note scrawled below noting the funds had been wired after selling stocks belonging to Alon Alexander. “Send 250k to Dershowitz,” it noted.
More than a year later, Dershowitz sent a letter to Alexander, the mother, and to Inbal Rosenthal, who is the family’s accountant, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who agreed to speak under condition of anonymity to protect their privacy. He was owed more money, he wrote.
“Between March 1, 2025, and June 11, 2026, I have devoted 142 ¾ hours” on behalf of the Alexander brothers, Dershowitz noted. His work included visiting them personally, meeting with their lawyers and reviewing options for clemency and pardons, he wrote. He noted that his hourly fee had increased to $2,750, but he was billing at his previous rate of $2,500 and was now owed an additional $106,857 on top of the retainer.
“Please wire an additional retainer of $250,000,” he wrote.
Kelly N. Moore, 46, of Burlington Township, award-winning clinical psychologist, founder of Moore Wellness LLC, director of the Center for Psychological Services at Rutgers University, graduate school clinical associate professor, former fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, mentor, author, mental health activist, volunteer, and 2026 Willingboro High School Hall of Fame inductee, died Thursday, Aug. 20, of kidney cancer at Virtua Voorhees Hospital.
Adept at treating anxiety, depression, trauma, and perinatal disorders, Dr. Moorebecame director of the Rutgers Center for Psychological Services and a clinical associate professor in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in 2020. As CPS director, she mentored hundreds of doctoral students regarding academic requirements and clinical procedures, and supervised the center’s community mental health clinic.
She significantly expanded the center’s services and outreach, Rutgers colleagues said in a Facebook tribute, and forged important partnerships on campus and in the community. Colleagues said: “Her warm demeanor, melodic voice, vibrant spirit, and calming presence made all who met, and were fortunate enough to know her, feel seen, welcomed, and heard.”
She spent two years as a fellow at Penn’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety after earning her doctorate in clinical psychology at Rutgers in 2011. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she founded Moore Wellness LLC and focused on helping women, children, and clients of color.
“Wellness does not mean you will never experience challenges,” Dr. Moore said in an online profile for Psychology Today magazine. “Rather, it means having the tools to manage the challenges when faced with them.”
Dr. Moore was an outspoken activist for mental health education and services. She spoke with groups often, organized workshops, and was featured in newspapers and magazines and on TV and podcasts. “Just trying to get people to understand as much as they can about the impact their mental health and well being have on their day-to-day lives,” she said in a 2026 podcast interviewwith the Multicultural Counseling Institute.
She belonged to the American Psychological Association and the New Jersey chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists. She was active with the Therapy for Black Girls podcast and the Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology.
Dr. Moore was a cheerleader and lacrosse player, and graduated from Cornell University in 2002.Courtesy of the family
She earned leadership and achievement awards from the New Jersey Psychological Association, the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology, and other groups. She was president and a board member of the Burlington County chapter of Jack and Jill of America Inc. Colleagues there called her “a beautiful example of leadership, service, grace, and love.”
Kelly Nicole Walker was born Aug. 20, 1980, in Philadelphia. Her family moved to Willingboro when she was 2, and she graduated from Willingboro High School in 1998.
She was a cheerleader and played lacrosse and viola as a teenager. Her mother, Diana, was a social worker, and she showed Dr. Moore up close how one person could impact their community.
“I was just fascinated by this concept,” Dr. Moore told the Multicultural Counseling Institute in the podcast interview. “It was already set at a young age that this was the kind of work I should be doing.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree in human development at Cornell University in 2002 and a master’s degree in education at Penn in 2003.
She met Melvin Moore through friends, and they married in 2004 and had sons Miles, Mason, and Matthew. They lived in Marlton and Delanco, and, since 2015, in Burlington Township.
Dr. Moore was a longtime member and dance choreographer at the Gospel Tabernacle Church. She joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. at Cornell in 2000 and was on the executive board of its Pi Mu Omega chapter in Willingboro.
Friends noted her “warmth, generosity, and kindness,” and called her “genuine” and “quietly brilliant” in online tributes. One friend said: “She sure made me proud to be from Willingboro.”
Dr. Moore and her husband, Melvin, married in 2004 and had three sons. Courtesy of the family
Dr. Moore doted on her sons and called them her “M & M’s.” She was an avid reader and led several book clubs.
She liked to garden, play piano, take photos, cook, and crochet. She was diagnosed with renal medullary carcinoma about a year ago and was determined, her husband said, to reach her 46th birthday. She did it.
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, a bipartisan campaign founded by philanthropists Olivia and Tom Walton, announced a $100 million pledge Thursday to make giving birth in the United States safer.
The five-year commitment aims to cut the maternal mortality rate in the United States in half by 2031.
“For millions of moms in America, maternal health is bad and getting worse,” Olivia Walton told The Associated Press in an interview. “There’s just so much bipartisan consensus around wanting to fix this. I really think the political will is there, and part of our job is to help surface that with an information campaign.”
According to the most recent data available, the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 688 people died in 2024 during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth. The maternal mortality rate rose to 19 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, up from 18.6 the year before.
Improving data collection and accelerating hospitals’ reporting of deaths is an important pillar of the new Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America initiative, Walton said. The most recent state-level data on maternal mortality is still from 2022, with annual totals based on provisional data available through 2024.
“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” she said, adding that the Waltons’ nonprofit Heartland Forward partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in May to collect more data on maternal and infant health outcomes from 220 hospitals around the country called the Perinatal Improvement Collaborative.
The U.S. maternal mortality issue is ‘eminently solvable’
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America President Neel Shah said that, unlike many medical issues, maternal mortality is “eminently solvable.”
“The biggest cause of suffering isn’t a lack of knowledge,” he said. “It’s a lack of execution on the knowledge. … This is a matter of will.”
The initiative will focus on expanding access to maternal health in rural areas, training midwives and expanding postpartum care, and helping states use strategies that have proved successful, Shah said. He points out that California has managed to reduce its maternal mortality rate by half by combining strategies with investments. He said New Jersey, which previously ranked 47th among states in maternal mortality, has improved its outcomes by focusing on the cities where the needs are greatest.
Walton said states are “in the driver’s seat” for making changes to maternal and infant healthcare, in part because about 40% of births are paid for by Medicaid.
“I’ve got blue-state solutions of what works, red-state solutions of what works, and purple-state solutions of what works,” she said. “It’s really possible.”
Using the $100 million initiative to generate more funding
For that reason, Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America plans to fund these care improvements by focusing on states. Walton plans to use the $100 million commitment as a way to encourage state governments to match the nonprofit’s investment. She hopes that corporations and other funders also contribute to the cause.
“Taking on risk and going first is a great use of philanthropic capital,” she said. “The goal is to prove that this works and then have state funding take it over.”
The focus on states, however, doesn’t mean the initiative won’t seek federal solutions as well.
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America is supporting bipartisan Congressional legislation, including the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act and the NIH IMPROVE Act, which would expand access to maternal care.
“It’s unacceptable that in 2026 in the U.S., maternal mortality rates are moving in the wrong direction,” Republican Sen. Katie Britt, of Alabama, said in a statement. “It’s imperative we work together across both the public and private sectors to reverse this alarming trend.”
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, of New Jersey, said poor maternal health outcomes don’t just hurt families.
“The economic consequences are equally alarming,” Booker said in a statement, estimating a cost of $165 billion each year.
Walton said the issue is a personal one for her and her husband, Tom, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who live in Arkansas.
“I’m a mom myself and I just had three kids in the last eight years,” she said. “I live in a state with the worst maternal mortality in the country.”
However, she also believes the issue has broad, national implications.
“I have an overarching belief that if you take care of mom, she’ll take care of everything else,” Walton said. “Healthy moms lead to healthy families. Healthy families lead to healthy communities. Healthy communities lead to a healthy economy.”
WASHINGTON — U.S. airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi militants from late 2023 to mid-2025 killed 213 civilians, according to a report released Thursday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Most of the casualties — 208 deaths and 341 wounded — occurred during President Donald Trump’s second term as his administration pursued the Iran-backed group.
The Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged civilian deaths in the 2024 attacks but has reported that it killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 in Yemen in 2025.
In October 2023, President Joe Biden ordered retaliatory airstrikes in Yemen after Houthi fighters attacked a Navy destroyer in the Red Sea, and again in January 2024 after Houthi missiles and drones targeted civilian vessels in the region.
The latter series of strikes continued until just weeks before Biden left office.
Trump ordered strikes on Houthi fighters in March 2025 in response to attacks on commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea launched from Yemen.
Beyond the loss of life, the report said hundreds of Yemenis lost farms, shops, factories, and small businesses in the attacks, leading to increased homelessness and worsening poverty among people who were already desperately poor.
“There’s a myth that an airstrike is going to strike a military target and kill a militant and it’s over,” said Stephanie Savell, an anthropologist and director of the Costs of War Project. “But what this report highlights are the reverberating, indirect, human costs of war. The report looks precisely at civilian infrastructure that’s targeted, not military infrastructure or outposts.”
Two U.S. attacks were particularly devastating, according to the researchers.
On April 17, 2025, the researchers said, U.S. forces killed 80 civilians in an attack on a port facility in the Houthi-controlled province of Hodeida.
Less than two weeks later, a U.S. attack on three warehouses used to detain African migrants killed 68 civilians.
Most of the workers killed at the port were the main breadwinners for their families, who have since slid deeper into poverty and hunger, according to Savell.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Costs of War Project is a collective of scholars who research the consequences of U.S. wars launched after the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. The project published the report with Mwatana for Human Rights, which did research inside Yemen and coproduced the report.
Investigators collected evidence by conducting interviews, analyzing weapon remnants and collecting documents including death certificates.
While the Pentagon has carried out many airstrikes in Yemen targeting al-Qaida fighters since the Sept. 11 attacks, the most recent U.S. strikes in the country have targeted the Houthis, who are part of the so-called Axis of Resistance led by Iran, along with the armed groups Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
According to the report, the Pentagon launched 930 airstrikes in Yemen from Dec. 18, 2023, to January 2025.
Then in March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis. By the end of April, the cost of Hegseth’s campaign was more than $1 billion.
Trump, frustrated with the lack of progress, halted the operation on May 5.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department attorney who advised on the law of war, said, “There are more significant civilian casualty incidents over the Rough Rider campaign than all the previous attacks during the Biden administration.”
He added that the Trump administration “launched two to three times the number of strikes Biden did.”
“Trump was also willing to bomb targets in more densely populated areas than Biden was,” he said. “Additionally, the migrant detention facility that was bombed in April 2025 had routinely been visited by officials from the Red Cross and should have been understood by Central Command as off-limits for attack.”
A Defense Department report on military operations for 2025 acknowledged the civilian death toll from the attacks on the port and the migrant detention facility, along with a strike in Sanaa, the capital, on April 6 that killed five civilians and wounded 25.
Condolence payments to survivors and the families of those who were killed, the report noted, were “determined to not be appropriate” in all three cases.
Just days after Hegseth took office in January 2025, the Army announced that it planned to close an office dedicated to reducing and mitigating civilian harm during combat operations. The office was reduced in March of that year from roughly 200 people to 11. At the time, Hegseth’s office declined to answer questions about the reductions.
Two major Latino civil rights groups, a voting rights organization, and the city of Denver sued the Trump administration on Thursday to keep armed immigration enforcement agents away from polling places, invoking a Civil War-era criminal law that generally prohibits federal officials from bringing “troops or armed men” to places where elections are held.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., comes eight days before in-person early voting begins in some states, such as Minnesota and South Dakota. It asks a judge to declare it unlawful for the administration to send armed agents to polling sites.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a Sept. 1 news conference in New York that ICE agents would not patrol polling places, but that they would go to one if there were a threat there or if they were serving a warrant on someone they had been tracking. “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be,” he said.
DHS has said in statements to media following Mullin’s comments that it “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but added that people could be arrested at a polling place if an active public safety threat arose there.
Democratic lawmakers and election officials have grown increasingly worried in recent months that armed federal officers or troops could be sent to polling sites. Local officials in states such as Arizona and Minnesota have gone as far as preparing emergency court filings and training personnel on how to respond.
Those fears have been fueled by calls among some allies of President Donald Trump — including at least three Republican gubernatorial candidates in different states — for sending armed federal agents and the National Guard to voting sites.
The lawsuit cites a year of public comments by Trump administration officials and allies. In February, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” Days later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location.” And in March, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is now attorney general, asked at a conservative gathering, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?”
The plaintiffs argue that pattern, capped by Mullin’s recent remarks, amount to a policy and plan by the administration.
The lawsuit Thursday was filed on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, UnidosUS, Common Cause, and the city and county of Denver.
It relies on an 1865 law that makes it a felony for any federal official to order “troops or armed men” to places where an election is held, unless the force is needed to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” Violators face up to five years in prison and disqualification from holding federal office. In 1909, Congress removed the law’s other exception — allowing armed men to “keep the peace at the polls.”
The plaintiffs argue that armed federal agents at polling places would intimidate voters — particularly Latinos and naturalized U.S. citizens — and could turn voting sites into places of confrontation.
“The right to vote is foundational to our democracy and yet this administration continues in its endless attempts to weaken the very institutions it is entrusted to protect,” said Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC. “The outcomes of elections define the future for all of us, and in America, voters should be able to cast their ballots without fear of intimidation by armed ICE officers at polling places.”
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The military has drawn a clearer line. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D, Mich.) in an Aug. 28 letter that the Joint Force “has no plans” to send federal troops or federalized National Guard members to polling places, or to use them to seize ballots or voting machines.
“I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” Caine wrote.
Trump has made sweeping claims of election fraud without evidence, alleging that large numbers of unauthorized immigrants will vote in November absent federal intervention. In March he signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict how mail ballots are handled and instructing DHS to build lists of U.S. citizens and share them with states. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the order to move forward last month, and the administration returned to the Supreme Court this week for a third time after a federal judge in Boston blocked the Postal Service rule.
The lawsuit invoked an 1865 law advanced by then-Democratic lawmakers angered by the Lincoln administration’s deployment of Union troops interfering in presidential elections in Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, according to legal historians.
That statute has never been tested, said University of Houston law school professor Chris Mirasola. No court has interpreted what counts as a place where an election is held, according to a Brennan Center for Justice analysis published in July, leaving unanswered whether the law reaches ballot drop boxes, election offices, and counting facilities as well as polling sites.
“The statute is incredibly old, and there is no case law about it, so all of this is going to be before the courts for the first time,” he said. “That always leaves questions about how it’s going to be interpreted.”
The plaintiffs, represented by attorneys with Democracy Forward, argue Congress explicitly banned armed federal officers from election sites to “provide and preserve free and fair elections, the rule of law, the right to vote, and Americans’ confidence in the sanctity of the ballot box.”
DHS’s “disregard for that statutory framework threatens our upcoming election,” the complaint said.
Mirasola said the law was a reaction to multiple instances of Union soldiers detaining Confederate-aligned candidates and blocking voters with ballots favoring those candidates during the wartime election in border states. Though the bill authors at the time were in the throes of a specific armed conflict, the rhetoric of the congressional debates were just as contemporary then as they are now, Marisola said. Lawmakers were hyper-focused on preserving the integrity of the electoral system.
“This lawsuit is alleging that what we are seeing in the lead-up to the midterms is the same kind of election interference because the administration has been dangling the possibility that there might be a deployment of armed federal agents,” Mirasola said.
The only exception for armed officers that has withstood time is in order to “repel armed enemies” of the United States. Lawmakers in the 1860s imagined those being Confederate soldiers. But the Trump administration could try to make a narrow argument identifying a different enemy, Mirasola said.
Plaintiffs will face another obstacle, according to Mirasola. The U.S. Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the avenues for the federal courts to issue prospective nationwide injunctions.
The complaint cited Justice Department actions to remove a manual explicitly stating the long-standing position of the government that armed federal agents are prohibited from election sites. They also pointed to the gutting of the department’s public integrity section, which wrote the document and advised law enforcement on legal matters during elections.
The complaint also points to three encounters involving immigration officers at voting sites during this year’s primaries: ICE officers converging on a traffic stop outside a San Antonio early voting site, where the county sheriff told them to leave; ICE vehicles outside a vote center in Simi Valley, California; and two federal agents entering a Syracuse, New York, library to warn a poll worker about an Instagram post naming the ICE agent who fatally shot Renée Good in Minneapolis.
LULAC, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization, has registered and mobilized Hispanic communities to the polls for nearly a century. Its hundreds of thousands of members have communicated worries that any federal presence could dampen turnout and fuel fears of racial profiling.
LULAC pointed to reporting by ProPublica, which found that immigration agents had detained more than 170 U.S. citizens, including more than 50 — nearly all of them Latino — who were held after agents questioned their citizenship.
Election workers across the country have been preparing for months. Some are being trained on de-escalation techniques in case of run-ins with federal agents and what hotlines to call to report potential disturbances.
In Denver, the clerk and recorder is already preparing to retrain the election judges who check in voters and empty the city’s 48 ballot drop boxes. The training covers how to de-escalate an encounter with federal agents, how to document what they do, and how to identify agents who are in plainclothes, according to the complaint. Election officials are also drawing up contingency plans to move voters to alternative polling sites.
The election judges are temporary workers, and Denver says it struggles to recruit enough of them for every election. Some, the city told the court, may now decline the job altogether.
“Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”
WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Thursday upheld a block on President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, a decision that comes as the Supreme Court considers the same case and states have already started sending out ballots for the high-stakes midterm elections.
The three-judge panel refused to lift a preliminary injunction against the order issued last week by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani. It prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from implementing Trump’s directive. The Postal Service has said it would not deliver ballots from states that did not pre-clear their envelope design with the federal government and submit a list of voters to an online portal, which has yet to be activated.
Election officials warn that it’s impossible to comply with those terms, especially with the first mail ballots already being sent out in Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
The panel of three judges nominated by former President Joe Biden agreed with the plaintiffs that the president does not have the power to regulate states’ election policy.
“Appellants have not made a strong showing that the district court erred in determining that the Final Rule is likely unlawful,” they wrote, a reference to a rule published by the Postal Service to implement Trump’s order.
The panel wrote that the Trump administration had done little to dispel arguments by many election officials that the changes would bring “chaos and widespread disenfranchisement.”
“Indeed, appellants have not even seriously challenged this aspect of the district court’s ruling, much less demonstrated why it is clearly erroneous,” the order states.
The government also hasn’t shown evidence of past fraud to justify the restrictions, the judges said.
A request for comment from the White House was not immediately returned.
The panel’s decision comes even as the Supreme Court is already considering the same case, which is part of a frenzied legal rush as states are beginning to send out mail ballots for this fall’s midterm elections. Democrats and civil rights groups in a separate lawsuit in Washington, D.C., also are trying to halt the executive order.
The 1st Circuit also had upheld a previous hold Talwani placed on the executive order. But that ruling was lifted by the Supreme Court in a procedural decision that did not determine whether the plan was constitutional.
Approaching the fourth anniversary of its rare and historic bankruptcy, the City of Chester is about to get $97.1 million in public and private investments, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Thursday.
“I might just be the happiest mayor in America,” said Chester Mayor Stefan Roots, among those who joined Shapiro for the announcement in Delaware County’s only city.
Shapiro, noting that the resolution of the protracted and often acrimonious bankruptcy “would take far longer than I’d like,” said “the time to invest in Chester is now.”
Roots said the money would go toward beautifying neighborhoods and dealing with blighted properties in the city of 33,000. “We’re going to be repairing homes. … We’re going to be improving roads and sidewalks,” he said.
The majority of the funding, $52.6 million, will go to “revamp and redesign” a section of Route 291/U.S. 13, part of the old “Industrial Highway,” which separates the riverfront from the city neighborhoods. The bulk of that money would come from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Council.
The highway has long been a serious safety hazard for motorists and people who live along it, Roots said in an interview after the event. Speeding has been a major issue, he added.
PennDot also would be putting up $7.3 million for new sidewalks and walkways to Widener University, at the north end of town, in an effort to integrate the campus with the rest of the city.
“How do you be a city with a college, and not be a college town?” Roots said.
He said major efforts would be made to spruce up the Avenue of the States, which is a thoroughfare from City Hall to the campus about 10 blocks away.
Mayor of Chester Stefan Roots speaks at a Philadelphia City Council meeting in January regarding the incinerator, which has been an important source of Chester’s revenue and a source of protests. Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
The state and the Philadelphia Union soccer team are putting up $27.5 million to build “new outdoor fields, a 100,000-square-foot field house, indoor courts, academy space, and a performance center to expand youth programs and support school and community sports” at the riverfront Sportsplex in the city’s West End, according to a state news release.
Wawa, Essential Utilities Inc., Power Home Remodeling, and Delaware County are contributing $2 million for demolition work and to acquire 10 lots and two buildings, along with fixing up 25 other structures.
Shapiro said that Chester was now an “enterprise zone,” a Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development program in which tax breaks and grant money would be made available to investors.
The department is overseeing the city’s bankruptcy process, which began in fall 2022, in part due to several years of missed pension payments.
But the city’s financial distress has been about 70 years in the making, as it has struggled to pay bills with the loss of businesses and its once-formidable industrial base. Among its prime sources of revenue today are an incinerator and a casino.
Among the nation’s more than 35,000 municipalities, only about 30 have filed for bankruptcy.
Neither Shapiro nor Roots made any mention of the bankruptcy beyond the governor’s opening comments.
State-appointed bankruptcy receiver Vijay Kapoor said in a statement: “We are very grateful for the commonwealth’s and the private sector’s investment in the City of Chester’s future.”
