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Naegleria fowleri is commonly found in warm freshwater, and if it enters through the nose, can cause brain damage

A North Carolina teenager has died after contracting a rare and often fatal brain-eating amoeba.

The state’s health department (NCDHHS) confirmed the boy’s death on Monday, saying: “NCDHHS has been informed that the teen who developed a rare illness, caused by Naegleria fowleri died on Aug. 31, 2026. We extend our condolences to the family, friends and community impacted by this loss.”

• Reigning singles champion beats Camila Osorio 6-2, 6-4

• Men’s 10th seed Arthur Fils beaten by Stefanos Tsitsipas

Aryna Sabalenka said she is determined to look ahead, rather than dwell on a difficult past few months, after beginning her US Open title defence with a 6-2, 6-4 victory against Camila Osorio.

“The good thing for me is not looking back no matter what, if it’s good or bad, because I feel a good result can also stop you from performing well because you’re basically focusing on the past,” Sabalenka said. “I never look back. If I win the tournament or lose the tournament, today is a new day, and I have to stay in the moment.”

На отдалённом острове живут сто безупречно логичных жителей с отличным зрением, и каждый из них знает, что все остальные обладают такими же способностями. Кроме того, у всех них яркие, насыщенно-голубые глаза.

Однако по их культурным обычаям цвет глаз никогда не обсуждается. Если кто-либо из жителей узнает, что у него голубые глаза, он обязан на следующем рассвете покинуть остров, устроив перед уходом эффектное представление, заметное всем остальным жителям. Поэтому на острове нет ни зеркал, ни камер, а сами островитяне никогда не смотрят на собственное отражение. И действительно, никто из них не знает цвета собственных глаз.

Однажды на остров приезжает гостья, которой все доверяют, и приятно проводит там некоторое время. В конце своего визита, перед отъездом, когда всё сообщество собирается её проводить, она замечает:

«По крайней мере у одного из вас голубые глаза».

Ровно через сто дней происходит следующее: на рассвете все островитяне устраивают большое эффектное представление и покидают остров.

Почему? Можете объяснить, каким образом каждый из островитян именно в этот день пришёл к знанию того, что у него голубые глаза?

Welp, the Supreme Court has decided that President Donald Trump gets to build his ballroom. The decision in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation is 5-4, with Republican Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three Democratic justices in dissent.

Notably, no member of the Court argued that Trump’s ballroom, an enormous structure that the president plans to build on the former site of the White House’s East Wing, is legal. As Roberts points out in dissent, a federal law prohibits the construction of any “building or structure … on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” And, as Roberts writes, “Congress has not passed any law resembling ‘express authority’ for the Executive’s construction of” Trump’s ballroom.

Nevertheless, the five Republicans in the majority manage to rule in favor of Trump by effectively immunizing his ballroom from federal lawsuits.

Their opinion highlights two of the most troubling things about the current Supreme Court: its reluctance to impose limits on Trump’s imperial-style presidency, and the frequent incoherence of its reasoning, especially in Trump cases.

Their opinion suggests that no one is allowed to sue to challenge Trump’s decision to destroy and replace much of the White House. But it is short, does not explain key points of its argument, and relies on several distinctions that do not make any sense.

As a general rule, no one is allowed to file a federal lawsuit unless they can show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they are suing — a requirement known as “standing.” But the Court has long held that plaintiffs suing under conservationist laws that seek to preserve a pristine, sacred, historical, or otherwise beautiful site have standing to bring a suit enforcing such laws against defendants who would damage or destroy such a site’s beauty.

In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), for example, the Court said that “the desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest” that can be asserted in federal court. Similarly, the Court held in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (2000) that “environmental plaintiffs adequately allege injury in fact when they aver that they use the affected area and are persons ‘for whom the aesthetic and recreational values of the area will be lessened’ by the challenged activity.’”

So that’s how standing worked right up until Monday afternoon, when the Court handed down its latest opinion. The new rule is…well, it is difficult to parse.

The plaintiff in National Park Service is a conservationist organization whose members include a retired professor who would frequently walk by the White House and who admired its beauty. Under decisions like Lujan and Friends of the Earth, that was enough to give her standing to sue in order to challenge the ballroom.

The five Republicans in the majority, however, falsely claim that this individual merely argued that she is offended by Trump’s construction project, and that past decisions have involved “more than mere offense.” The Republicans note that, in Friends of the Earth, the plaintiffs not only wanted to view a river, but also to fish and swim in it and to camp nearby. But they don’t really even attempt to distinguish Lujan beyond a vague statement that Lujan requires a plaintiff’s injury to be “concrete and particularized.”

Thus, because the majority opinion is so poorly explained, it is hard to tell what its implications will be. If the Court had explicitly overruled its past decisions holding that a plaintiff may often sue to challenge the destruction of something beautiful, that would be an existential threat to countless environmental, conservationist, and historical preservation laws that all exist to preserve natural or historic beauty. 

But the Court’s failure to explain why Lujan does not require them to rule against Trump leaves lawyers and judges to guess at what the Court just did to the rules governing standing. Perhaps this is a one-off decision intended solely to do a favor for Trump. Or maybe it’s the harbinger of a future decision setting much of America’s environmental protection regime on fire. The five justices in the majority barely explain themselves, so we cannot yet know what National Park Service means.

But one thing that is clear is that the decision makes no sense. As Roberts writes in dissent, “it now is the case that ‘I want to look at a crocodile’ can adequately answer the ever-critical ‘what’s it to you?’ question of Article III standing, while ‘I want to look at the White House’ cannot.” But the justices in the majority couldn’t even be bothered to explain why.

Naegleria fowleri is commonly found in warm freshwater, and if it enters through the nose, can cause brain damage

A North Carolina teenager has died after contracting a rare and often fatal brain-eating amoeba.

The state’s health department (NCDHHS) confirmed the boy’s death on Monday, saying: “NCDHHS has been informed that the teen who developed a rare illness, caused by Naegleria fowleri died on Aug. 31, 2026. We extend our condolences to the family, friends and community impacted by this loss.”

При разработке корпоративных приложений на Spring Boot одной из важнейших задач является организация качественного логирования. Особенно критичным это становится при работе с микросервисной архитектурой, где необходимо отслеживать как входящие HTTP-запросы, так и исходящие вызовы к внешним сервисам.

В статье описан пример решения для логирования на базе Spring AOP, с помощью которого можно автоматически логировать входящие HTTP-запросы в контроллерах, отслеживать исходящие запросы через WebClient, гибко управлять видимостью чувствительных данных через аннотации, а также автоматически отключать маскирования в зависимости от уровня логирования.

Letter from chair of joint chiefs of staff addresses concerns over Trump officials using military to interfere with vote

The highest‑ranking US military officer says there are no plans to deploy troops to polling places during the November midterm elections – responding to Senator Elissa Slotkin’s request for information amid concerns about whether the Trump administration might send service members to election sites.

In a letter obtained by the Guardian, first reported by the Associated Press, Gen Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, told Slotkin “the Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections”. He added that there are also “no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election‑related material”.

Phantom Ranch, set up by Teddy Roosevelt, has welcomed exhausted hikers to its famed cabins for over a century

• Two dead and nearly 80 rescued after Grand Canyon flash flood

Phantom Ranch has been a solitary refuge visited by some of the most famous names of history. More typically, it’s been a beacon for the half-collapsed, exhausted and overheated hikers trudging down the Grand Canyon for more than a century.

The sole lodge at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon, the cabins long had a near mythical reputation. Located along the Bright Angel Creek, which tumbles into the mighty Colorado River at the base of the canyon, they served as a reminder of the long history of one of America’s most spectacular but savage environments.

The smile on Declan Rice’s face with six minutes of normal time remaining said it all. He had just shut down Ian Maatsen as the Aston Villa full-back zoomed into the box. Arsenal, for whom Bukayo Saka scored the only goal, were authoritative and seemingly took great satisfaction in keeping Villa at arm’s length.

Unai Emery’s work‑in‑progress side struggled to test the champions, David Raya untroubled. The records will show Villa have lost their first two league matches of a season without scoring for the first time since 2002 but, despite successive defeats, this time there was no capitulation.

North Carolina DA says girl, 17, who disseminated attackers’ manifesto charged with murder by aiding and abetting

A 17-year-old North Carolina girl who recorded a livestream of a shooting that killed three people at a San Diego mosque and disseminated the attackers’ white-supremacist writings has been charged with murder by aiding and abetting, a district attorney said on Monday.

Forsyth county district attorney Jim O’Neill said at a news conference in Winston-Salem that the girl, whose name was not mentioned during the news conference, was arrested last week. On Monday, just before she was due to begin the school year, a grand jury indicted her on three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again war with Iran is officially on again. (So recursive is this never-ending conflict, in fact, that I had to search my inbox to confirm I hadn’t already written that sentence!)

On Sunday, the US attacked rocket launchers Sunday on Iran’s Larak Island, claiming the strikes were necessary to prevent Iran from laying mines that could once again disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, meanwhile, responded by firing a volley of ballistic missiles at US sites in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, where they were reportedly intercepted. 

The latest skirmish comes after a month of relative peace and quiet, and six months after the war began. You’ll recall that Trump initially said it would last four to five weeks at the very longest. 

But in the grand scheme of Trump’s Iran fictions, that optimistic timeline isn’t even the most flagrant. On Sunday night, the president also posted a video that purportedly showed Kharg Island, a central hub of Iran’s oil industry, “being blown to smithereens!!!” The video was, in fact, AI-generated. 

Go a little deeper

The persistence of the war in Iran isn’t merely exhausting for those of us following along at home. As a group of high-ranking military commanders recently warned the Pentagon, the drawn-out conflict could also make America less safe by limiting the military’s ability to respond to threats in other parts of the world. 

That unusual warning — first reported over the weekend by the Washington Post — suggested that the war in Iran is tying up ships and surveillance planes that the US needs elsewhere. Several top military leaders explicitly warned that the war had forced them to give up resources they needed to protect the US itself. 

That’s not the only risk of the ongoing conflict, either. Longer deployments have also eroded troop morale and disrupted ship maintenance. And as the war drags on, the US is burning through its stockpiles of advanced missiles, at a cost of many billions of dollars. 

None of this means we’re defenseless, of course. But the war in Iran is taking up a lot of bandwidth. And should another conflict break out anywhere else on earth…the US and its allies could feel it. 

One general warned the Pentagon that, without more resources, he could be forced to choose between protecting Israel and the US from ballistic missile attacks. And the Navy just moved its only dedicated aircraft carrier in the Pacific to the waters near Iran. “We are really robbing Peter to pay Paul,” one military expert told Vox in late February, even before we had any idea how long the war would last.

One link for later

➨ Ditch the doorbell camera. More than 62 percent of respondents in a recent US News survey said they had an outdoor security camera at home. But there’s not much evidence that those cameras reduce crime — and they can damage your relationship with your neighbors. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the known world basically ended around 1200 BCE? A number of sophisticated civilizations collapsed at the same time, probably due to some combination of prolonged drought, earthquakes, migration, war and political instability.
• Today’s trivia: What was the name of Japan’s capital city before it was renamed Tokyo? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the name of the athletic conference where Georgia Tech competes. That would be the ACC, or Atlantic Coast Conference, which confusingly includes a number of schools in the West and Midwest.