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Former President Donald Trump is expected to surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on Tuesday to face criminal charges. While most people in that situation have to pose for a mug shot, it is not clear if the former President will be made to do so. And if he does, it’s not known when or even if that historic image will be made public. The state of New York does not normally release mug shot photos.

So on Monday, barring a leak from someone on the inside, a few Trump supporters began discussing ways to create fake mug shots. In online pro-Trump groups, they spread false rumors that New York officials had removed all criminal mug shots from the Internet in order not to have to release the former President’s photo. “Let’s make our own version and circulate it!” one person posted on a popular pro-Trump forum. “No one will know what’s real!” Another person posted “If they don’t release the mug shot immediately, just stage a mug shot as to not hold up any billboards, t-shirts, posters, or fundraising drives.”

In recent years, doctored images of Trump in jail, handcuffs, or otherwise being held accountable for criminal charges were widely spread by left-wing critics. (This includes photoshopped TIME Magazine covers showing Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit that went viral during his presidency.) But the enthusiastic embrace of these images by his own supporters shows the extent to which they believe that any evidence of Trump’s prosecution only strengthens the narrative that this is a politicized “witch hunt.”

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Read More: Live Updates on Trump’s Indictment

“Literally just give me a poster or a mug of his mug shot [photoshopped] over an American flag and I’ll buy your entire stock,” one person posted on a pro-Trump online forum. “I will be the first to put that mug shot on my new T-shirt and wear it around everywhere, while talking the gospel of MAGA & martyrdom!” another posted. “We will take whatever mug shot comes out and meme Trump back into the White House with it.”

Claire Wardle, a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health who specializes on misinformation and user-generated content, says that there’s been a spike in people creating fake images in recent weeks due to advances in AI technology. Already, fake images depicting Trump’s arrest, French President Emmanuel Macron in the streets of Paris, and even the Pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket, have gone viral online, fooling many internet users.

“These kinds of conversations show that the real danger isn’t always people being misled, it’s the fact that over time people are increasingly struggling to know what or who to trust,” she says. “As this [user] says explicitly ‘no one will know what’s real!’—that’s often the aim of those sowing disinformation.”

Read More: How to Spot an AI-Generated Image Like the ‘Balenciaga Pope’

Over the last couple months, publicly-accessible AI-image generation tools, such as Midjourney, have grown powerful enough to generate photorealistic imagery. While the image of the Pope did contain some telltale signs of fakery—such as blurry hands and drooping eyeglasses—it was convincing enough to fool many internet users, including the celebrity Chrissy Teigen. “I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought,” she wrote. “No way am I surviving the future of technology.”

Although no convincing fake images of Trump’s mug shot have gone viral yet, Wardle says “it’s likely people will see fake and AI generated mug shots of Trump” in the coming days.

For Trump, the historic mug shot image could be used as fuel for campaign attacks ads and donor appeals to capture the collective sense of grievance among the MAGA faithful. Trump has already raised more than $5 million after news broke on Thursday that a Manhattan grand jury indicted him over charges related to hush money payments to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.

Read More: How Trump Is Negotiating the Details of His Indictment to Maximize the Drama

And as Trump prepares for his day in court on Tuesday, he’s likely getting ready to choreograph the spectacle that would follow. “We’ll have a mug shot. For the record, it will be the most manly, most masculine, most handsome mug shot of all time,” joked Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesman who still speaks regularly with Trump. “I can say that definitely, before having even seen it.”

But there may be some hesitancy within Trump’s inner circle. One of Trump’s attorneys—Alina Habba—told CNN on Monday that “there’s no need” for the former President to even take one. “Mug shots are for people so that you recognize who they are. He is the most recognized face in the world, let alone the country right now, so there’s no need for that. There’s no need for the theatrics,” she said.

“I do have a problem with leaking of pictures,” Habba added. “I think that because we’re in a campaign, because he’s the leading GOP candidate, it’s not going to help anything.”

The western media has shown strange mixes of courage and cowardice, as well as naivety and cynicism, in their parroting of Putin disinformation. On the one hand, the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal has pursued the truth on Russia’s economic implosion to the peril of its kidnapped Moscow based reporter Evan Gershkovich. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s firing from the Murdoch-controlled Fox News last week, perhaps the loudest laments came from, of all places, the Kremlin, with Kremlin commentators mourning the loss of an anchor who consistently echoed Putin’s talking points to the point where Russian state media often used re-runs of Tucker’s show.

In fact, CNN’s Erin Burnett just showed how false declarations from Carlson that “if there is any single American who deserves scorn and indeed blame for the invasion of Ukraine, it is Joe Biden” and “Ideologues within the Biden Administration did not want a negotiated peace in Ukraine, they wanted a regime change war against Russia” literally echoed, word-for-word, prior commentary from Kremlin spokespeople and Russian state media. Even worse, Carlson repeated, verbatim, doctored and false “intelligence” that there were seven Ukrainian casualties for every Russian casualty when in reality these numbers were invented, the product of a pro-Putin former Navy technician named Sarah Bils digitally altering leaked documents from the Discord trove and posting them online.

But Tucker Carlson is not the only western journalist to repeat Russian propaganda. Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz’s Newsguard has found more than 350 news sites promoting 100 false narratives about Russia’s war in Ukraine. One pervasive but false propaganda myth hits particularly close to home.

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In recent days, Putin’s personal press secretary Dmitry Peskov has picked up a line of attack against the authors of this piece, arguing that we are frauds and that we brazenly invented the exits of over 1,000+ western multinationals from Russia, citing a provably false “research” study authored by individuals who called for our criminal indictment. us.

Putin did not have to invent this line of attack, as he got it straight from naïve western media who even now continue to cite the debunked, fraudulent research as if it were credible fact, even though it has been thoroughly disproven.

Putin’s goal as he loses the military, diplomatic, and economic wars is to win the information war to erode allied unity. It has become progressively harder for him to pretend that he is winning the diplomatic war as his top diplomat faced open laughter and jeers when he claimed in New Delhi that Ukrainian aggression started the war.

Similarly, it has become more difficult for Putin to pretend that the military war is going smoothly when his troops are visibly getting ground into the dust, though Putin did still try – laughably claiming six Ukrainian casualties for every Russian casualty, which was universally dismissed. But sadly, on the economic war, western media remains strangely naïve to Putin’s economic disinformation in perpetuating a prevalent but false myth of Russian economic resilience.

But that resilience is a Potemkin façade. For instance, can it be a coincidence that the list of “1,404 western companies” featured in the disproved research study is actually a list of mainly Russian companies and Russian oligarchs who can hardly leave Russia and are not capable of divesting, as we have shown, and that TASS and Russian state media instantaneously and prominently showcased it on the day of its release. In reality their research has been thoroughly discredited by The Wall Street Journal’s data analysis expert Josh Zumbrun who was unable to replicate their findings and by other major objective outlets ranging from the Swiss National Radio, Semafor, and many more.

Yes, we are serious – they actually substituted Russian people and Russian companies masquerading as western corporations! Could the FSB actually be that clumsy or is this just a sheer accident and the researchers meant to stuff the list with Argentine, Icelandic, or Zambian companies?

Meanwhile, neglected from their study were hundreds of bona fide western multinationals such as Airbus, American Express, Amazon, American Airlines, BCG, Boeing, Commerzbank, Citigroup, Deloitte, DeutscheBank, DeutscheTelekom, EY, Honeywell, International Paper, JPMorgan, Marriott, McKinsey, Otis, Raytheon, Wells Fargo, and hundreds more, as we chronicle here.

Yet inexplicably, respected western journalists such as Jamil Anderlini and Doug Busivine at Politico EU, and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany of The Financial Times continue to cite this debunked “research” uncritically, echoing Putin crony Peskov’s triumphant recitations. As one particularly galling example, a formerly Moscow-based correspondent from the Washington Post unethically exploited our list as a misleading foil to argue that companies are not really exiting – without ever contacting us for comment or insight.

This misguided journalist argues erroneously that companies many companies “have done less than promised”, breathlessly, scandalously citing examples such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But the truth is that neither company ever pledged to fully exit Russia and only pledged partial exits to begin with, which is why they have ranked as “C” – partially scaling back, on our publicly posted list of exits. We too wish that Coke and Pepsi had announced a full pull-out but they didn’t. That is why they are NOT graded as “A” or “B” firms.

No one has questioned the A and B companies on that list, available for public inspection, though we did have to downgrade a few companies on our own for returning to Russia such as Heineken, Carlsberg, and Pernod Ricard. The fact some companies have partially withdrawn amidst a small handful of downgrades does not erode the inspiring historic milestone of over 1,000 major multinational companies fully pulling out of Russia, six times the prior historic record of the highly effective, 200 companies exiting South Africa in protest of the Apartheid regime.

Other journalists also mistakenly set up our list of carefully-researched companies as an inferior foil to misleading studies, including some who repackage our list without any scaled rubric of gradations of exits, joining an echo chamber of simplistic dichotomous “in’ vs. “out” categorizations which does not capture the more complicated reality of scaled exits and different degrees of exit. They are also confused by phantom accounts which Putin has retained in the names of these companies, when in reality these companies have written off their assets completely.

Furthermore, some journalists misleadingly set our list up as a foil against the impressive database maintained by our colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics, when in reality our work is complimentary as their list includes smaller, local proprietorships while our list is focused on multinational corporations. We work closely with them, with weekly exchanges of data and in-person collaboration visits for the past year, towards our commonly shared goals and in fact even co-authored with them critiques of the deceptive attacks on our work.

We wish we could say that the above facts should finally put to rest these fallacious cynical narratives, but unfortunately, at this point, even though anyone can access our list of 1,000+ companies, the myth that we somehow “invented” the Russian business retreat may not be put to rest so easily. But it is not just about businesses pulling out of Russia. Like the conquering of a recurring villain in a Stephen King horror movie, we again have to address the insidious Putin propaganda unfortunately channeled by western media that somehow the broader Russian economy is resilient, and that business exits combined with western sanctions have barely made any dent – especially thanks to pernicious IMF economist forecasts repeating Putin’s propaganda.

Putin has kept ironclad control over the release of economic statistics since the start of the war, selectively tossing out unfavorable metrics. Prior to the war, these statistics were released on a monthly basis but now, the Kremlin withholds statistics relating to exports and imports, particularly with Europe; oil and gas monthly output data; commodity export quantities; capital inflows and outflows; financial statements of major companies; central bank monetary base data; foreign direct investment data; lending and loan origination data; and even Rosviastsiya, the federal air transport agency, abruptly ceased publishing data on airline and airport passenger volumes. Last week, Russia started withholding all data related to oil for the indefinite future.

Yet the IMF somehow predicts that the Russian economy will grow more than that of Europe’s this year, based on Putin’s false GDP numbers, while practically every peer organization from the World Bank to the UN to investment banks have negative economic contraction in Russia this year. Even the Russian Central Bank predicts a negative 1% economic contraction while the IMF predicts a positive 0.7% growth.

In fact, we have the IMF economists admitting to us in recorded conversations that they are flying blind, as Putin has concealed the national income statistics required to be a IMF member and required for the IMF to verify Russia’s economic statistics, and the IMF plainly confesses to having “zero visibility” into what is happening in Russia as their own economists have evacuated and they are no longer in contact with Russian government sources.

Furthermore, if it weren’t tragically echoed by western media, it would be amusing that IMF economists confuse top-line energy revenues with bottom-line profits, or in this case, losses. In defense of their growth forecast, the IMF says “Russian crude oil export volumes are not expected to be significantly affected, with Russian trade continuing to be redirected from sanctioning to non-sanctioning countries.” Perhaps their calculus is too sophisticated and they forgot arithmetic. $45 a barrel to extract oil plus $10-$12 to transport to India and China equals $57. The current Urals oil pricing is ~$55, nothing for the IMF or Putin to celebrate. Maybe the IMF economists needed MBAs with their PhDs to explain you cannot make up losses in the volume, as the old retailing quip goes.

These lies from the IMF buttress a media narrative spread by the likes of august commentators such as Fareed Zakaria, Larry Summers, Anton Troianovski, The Washington Post, and Politico EU which purports sanctions are having little effect on Russia when in reality these cynics are falling for Putin’s fake stats hook, line, and sinker.

The same western media that would wince at the idea of 83 Russian journalists that lost their balance on windowsills under Putin and 36 oligarchs who questioned Putin somehow ran in the path of cars or off of balconies by accident, accept uncritically Putin’s similarly fallacious economic machinations.

The courageous journalists who do report on Russia’s crumbling economy get to the critical truth, which is the impact of business exits from Russia, combined with powerful sanctions and price caps, have badly crippled Putin’s economy. All objective economic data suggests Russia’s economy is becoming increasingly undone at the seams, with economic activity in many sectors down upwards of 60% to 95%, and with Putin losing $500 million a day in energy sales relative to his windfall profits last year.

Yes, more economic pressure is needed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the job is far from finished. A group of researchers led by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Andriy Yermak have put together a roadmap for further sanctions that are needed to choke Russia’s war machine. But the fact more work remains should not detract from the fact that sanctions and business retreats are taking a heavy toll on Russia’s economy – which is the truth no matter what media narratives spin.

Perhaps the most cynical Moscow beat reporters should spend less time in Moscow’s café society with their crumbcakes and more time in the factories with crumbling industrial supply chains.

Netflix, the streaming company that once tweeted “Love is sharing a password,” has begun cracking down on password sharing in the United States, as it looks to increase revenue in what has become a saturated streaming market.

The company has previously said that more than 100 million subscribers worldwide access Netflix through password sharing and revealed in April 2022 that it lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade. The company added 7.66 million new subscribers for the final quarter of 2022, when it launched its lower-cost, ad-supported tier, and gained 1.75 million net new subscribers in the first quarter of 2023.

More from TIME

The streamer has been slowly rolling out its new password protocol worldwide. Earlier this week, the company began alerting U.S. customers who shared their accounts with others outside their household about the new policy. “Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with—your household,” the company said on Tuesday.

Here’s what this means for users.

How Will Netflix Enforce This?

With the new policy, only users who are part of a “Netflix Household”—those who are using the same internet connection—will be able to access the account unless they are paid additional users added onto a Standard or Premium plan. Those who are currently borrowing a Netflix password will get an update when they try to log in that tells them how to start their own account, the Washington Post reported.

A Netflix spokesperson said that if a viewer who is outside of a household attempts to log into that household’s account, that person will “see notifications in the Netflix product flow prompting them to either port their profile to a new account using Profile Transfer or being added as an extra member” to an existing account, which would come at an additional cost.

The company says it will use​​ information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device is part of a household, and insists that it will not collect GPS data from users.

Netflix has said that customers will still be able to access their accounts while traveling, on their personal devices or a television in a hotel or vacation home. It remains unclear how long a device will be allowed to remain logged in from another location.

What Can Users Do?

For a price, subscribers with the $15.49 a month Standard plan can add one extra member outside of their household, while those with the $19.99 a month Premium plan can add two. For both tiers, each extra user would cost an additional $7.99 per month. According to Netflix, the additional member will have their own profile, account, and password, but their membership will be paid for by the person who invited them to join.

Users who have been added to these memberships have to activate their accounts in the same country as the original membership, can only view or download content on one device at a time, and they can’t create extra profiles, or log in as a Kids profile.

Users who were previously sharing a subscription and decide to fork the cash for their own account, can transfer their old profiles to a new account. The streamer now offers a $6.99 “Standard with ads” that includes “all but a few movies and TV shows” while the $9.99 Basic account offers unlimited, ad-free streaming. The company’s Standard and Premium options offer additional perks like the option to use more than one device at a time and download content on multiple devices.

The suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk, the influential co-founder of the right-wing youth activist group Turning Point USA, has been named as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

According to an "Affidavit of Probable Cause," filed by the Utah State Court and reviewed by TIME, Robinson was arrested in Washington County on Sept. 12 at 4 a.m., local time, for three offenses: "Aggravated murder, Felony discharge of firearm causing serious bodily injury, and Obstruction of justice."

He’s currently being held without bail at Utah County Jail.

"We got him," said Utah's Gov. Spencer Cox, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and other federal officials, during a press conference on Friday morning.

“On the evening of Sept. 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend, who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office with information that Robinson had confessed to them, or implied, that he had committed the incident,” said Cox, adding that Robinson had allegedly mentioned that Kirk would be speaking at the Utah Valley University to a family member at dinner, prior to the event taking place on Sept. 10.

Cox said a family member had also told the authorities that Robinson "had become more political in recent years" and had criticised Kirk, claiming he was "full of hate."

Investigators reviewed additional video from Utah Valley University surveillance and identified Robinson arriving on campus in a grey Dodge Challenger at approximately 8.29 a.m., local time, on the day Kirk was fatally shot.

Investigators then interviewed Robinson's roommate, who showed them messages between him and an account with the name "Tyler" on the messaging app Discord.

The messages from "Tyler" stated the need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving it in a bush, watching the area where the rifle was left, and having left the weapon wrapped up in a towel. The messages also mentioned that the rifle was "unique" and the bullets engraved.

Per Cox, investigators uncovered bullet casings that had various inscriptions engraved on them. The casing that had been fired read: “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”

Three unfired casings were also found. One read: “Hey fascist! Catch!” with an up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols. Another was engraved with the words: “Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao.” A third read: “If you read this you are gay lmao.”

A motive for the crime has not yet been publicly identified. Cox said he thought Robinson acted alone and at this point there is no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved.

Read More: The Killing of Charlie Kirk and the Political Violence Haunting America

Utah public safety Commissioner Beau Mason told the New York Times that Robinson surrendered to officers at the sheriff’s office in southwest Utah.

“When our investigators got down there, they were able to peacefully make contact with him and move through that process of making the arrest,” Mason said to the Times, adding that Robinson’s family “did a great job of helping him come to a positive resolution to turn himself in.”

“I want to thank the family members of Tyler Robinson, who did the right thing in this case and were able to bring him into law enforcement,” said Cox during the press briefing.

“This is what happens when you let good cops be cops," said Patel. “The FBI and our partners are proud to stand here today together to bring justice to the family of Charlie Kirk and honor his memory.”

Patel also thanked the public effort, sharing that as of Friday morning, 11,000 leads had been provided to the FBI.

Highlighting that the case is still “very much an ongoing investigation,” Patel said the FBI “will continue to work with state and local authorities to develop the investigation, to provide them the evidence they need for their ongoing prosecutions.”

“Lastly, to my friend, Charlie Kirk. Rest now brother, we have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla,” Patel concluded.

What do we know about the suspect, Tyler Robinson?

The 22-year-old is a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College, the Utah Board of Higher Education confirmed on Friday.

The college is in St. George, which is based in Washington County, where Robinson was apprehended by law enforcement.

Utah State University, based in Logan, confirmed Friday that Robinson had attended the school “briefly” for one semester in 2021. In an email to TIME, Utah State University said Robinson was a pre-engineering major, and took classes consistent with that major, after which he took a leave of absence.

A video posted to a family member's social media account shows Robinson reading his acceptance letter to the university on a prestigious academic scholarship.

Robinson joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at a young age, a church spokesperson told the Associated Press, but it is not known whether he still attended services.

Investigators are still working to determine a potential motive for the killing. He is registered to vote, according to state registration data, but is not affiliated with a political party, and did not vote in the two most recent general elections.

According to Gov. Cox, a family member told investigators that Robinson had become "more political" in recent years and was critical of Kirk, who he believed was "full of hate."

Read More: Gabby Giffords: I Mourn for Charlie Kirk's Family

The shooting and investigation leading up to the suspect being caught

The fatal shooting of Kirk occurred on Wednesday at around 12:20 p.m., local time, as he was addressing the crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on the first stop of his fall campus tour. He was surrounded by around 3,000 attendees when he was struck in the neck.

Prior to the capture of Robinson, two people were taken into custody on the day of the shooting, but were swiftly released after the police determined that they had not been involved.

Shortly before Gov. Cox and the FBI held a press conference on Friday morning, President Donald Trump had said during a live interview on Fox and Friends that he thought the suspect, "the person that they wanted," had been caught.

"I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him in custody," Trump said in the New York Fox News studio. The President warned that the information was preliminary, adding that he had been told the update "five minutes" before stepping onto the set.

The FBI had released a video of the suspect along with additional photos on Thursday night and reiterated its request for the public to come forward with any information.

CCTV footage from the Utah Valley University parking lot shows a person—now thought to be Robinson—running across a building roof, from where they are believed to have shot at Kirk. The person can be seen climbing down from the roof, before walking to a road which they begin to cross.

The FBI said Thursday night that the suspect left shoe impressions on the rooftop, as well as a forearm and palm print. The ammunition and weapon used in the attack were also found in a nearby wooded area.

Gov. Cox had pledged to pursue the death penalty once the suspect was caught.

Read More: MSNBC Apologizes Over Matthew Dowd’s ‘Insensitive’ On-Air Comments After Charlie Kirk Shooting

Speaking at the press conference on Thursday night, Cox issued a warning, particularly to those using social media, regarding disinformation in the quickly-moving case.

"I think Charlie said it best, that when things get bad we should put our phones down and spend a little time with our families,” said Cox. “There is a tremendous amount of disinformation we are tracking… Our adversaries want violence. We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”

The most powerful storm to ever hit Jamaica has torn across the island on Tuesday, bringing catastrophic winds, floodwaters, and a storm surge that have caused widespread power outages and as-yet-untold destruction.

Hurricane Melissa intensified to a Category 5 storm on Monday and continued to strengthen as it moved closer to Jamaica, where it was forecast to cause life-threatening flash flooding, landslides, and devastating damage to infrastructure. It arrived on the island’s southwestern coast around noon local time Tuesday.

The storm is the strongest to hit the island since record-keeping began, with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph upon landfall, though they have since weakened to 145 mph. “This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation!” the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami warned as the storm reached land, instructing people in the hurricane’s path not to leave shelter.

Read more: Why Are We Seeing More Category 5 Hurricanes?

Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister of local government, said during a news conference in the early evening that he had "nothing official" on reported deaths yet and it was too early to assess the damage, but "the entire Jamaica has felt the brunt of Melissa.”

He described the southwestern parish of St. Elizabeth as being "underwater" and said roads were blocked, trees were down, and excessive flooding was occurring in almost every parish in the country. At least three major hospitals have been damaged in the storm; at Black River Hospital in St. Elizabeth, he said, 75 patients had to be evacuated after Melissa knocked out power. McKenzie said he knew of three families who were "marooned," with floodwaters trapping them in their homes in Black River in western Jamaica and the hurricane keeping crews from coming to their rescue.

“We are hoping and praying that the situation will ease so that some attempt can be made to get to those persons,” he said.

As the hurricane began to pull away from Jamaica Tuesday evening, it had been downgraded to a Category 4 storm, but meteorologists warned that conditions were still very dangerous.

Some 165,000 people in Jamaica were at risk from the hurricane, according to estimates by the Red Cross. The NHC has warned of “total structural failure” for buildings in Melissa’s direct path. Roughly 530,000 people were without power Tuesday evening, officials said, as Jamaica Public Service Company, the sole distributor of electricity in the country, has experienced complications from the storm.

Three people died in the country as they were preparing for Melissa’s arrival, according to Minister of Health and Wellness Christopher Tufton. Another 13 people were injured.

Jamaican officials issued dire warnings about the damage the hurricane would do. “Jamaica, this is not the time to be brave,” McKenzie told the nation in an address earlier Tuesday.

"Don't bet against Melissa—it is a bet we can't win."

The previous day, McKenzie urged Jamaicans to "take this seriously," warning, "Many of these communities will not survive this flooding.”

"There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5," Prime Minister Andrew Holness said. "The question now is the speed of recovery. That's the challenge."

The center of the hurricane, which made landfall in the country's southwest near New Hope, was moving back into the Caribbean Sea on Tuesday evening, according to the NHC. Roving teams are responding to calls for help.

Seven communities were placed under emergency evacuation orders starting on Sunday night. More than 800 shelters have been opened across Jamaica, although only 382 were in use as of Tuesday afternoon. About 15,000 people were housed in the shelters that evening, according to officials.

Local authorities confirmed Tuesday that 25,000 tourists are on the island. 

Holness, the prime minister, urged Jamaicans to cooperate with evacuation orders to save lives. “You have been warned,” he said on Monday, adding, "I have been on my knees in prayer."

Read more: What Do Hurricane Categories Actually Mean?

Fishermen along the coast of the island began to gather their boats and secure their goods on Sunday night, according to the Jamaica Observer. Dennis Gordon, a vendor at the Ocho Rios Craft Market, told the local media outlet he was bracing for the impact, pointing to the 1988 catastrophic Category 4 Hurricane Gilbert. “We [will] take a good while to come back on our feet,” he said. “We go through Gilbert and it was very, very, bad; out of food, out of water, out of light. I can only hope it don’t reach back to this because it’s coming serious.”

Category 5 storms—the highest level a hurricane can reach on the Saffir-Simpson scale and strong enough to cause “uninhabitable conditions”—often lead to roof failure, the collapse of walls, and fallen poles and trees.

Hurricane-force winds can be felt 30 miles from the storm’s center, while tropical-storm force winds can be felt 195 miles away.

Read more: How Are Hurricanes Named? Here’s What You Need to Know

The Jamaican government launched a Hurricane Melissa relief website on Tuesday to assist those in need. The United Nations, Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, along with the U.S. and European Union, have made calls of support.  

International food organizations have been preparing for the storm’s destruction. The International Organization for Migration indicated they are coordinating the distribution of food and other items, which are expected to arrive in Jamaica by Thursday. The Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston could start allowing emergency relief flights starting that same day, officials said Tuesday.  

Anywhere from 12 to 24 inches of rainfall are forecast to pour on the Caribbean island, according to the NHC’s most recent update on Tuesday evening. The NHC added that some isolated areas over mountainous terrain could see nearly 30 inches of rainfall. The center said that storm surge flooding on the southern coast of the island should subside by Tuesday evening, but that the northwest coast could experience a storm surge of 2 to 4 feet above ground level. 

Melissa is expected to reach Cuba by Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning “as an extremely dangerous major hurricane,” before heading to the Southeast Bahamas. Anywhere from 10 to 20 inches of rainfall are forecast to pour on eastern Cuba through Wednesday, reaching as high as 25 inches over mountainous terrain. “This will cause life-threatening and potentially catastrophic flash flooding with numerous landslides,” the NHC said in its latest update. About 5 to 10 inches of rainfall are expected in the Southeast Bahamas through Wednesday, which the NHC warned will lead to flash flooding.

Officials indicated they would evacuate more than 600,000 people due to Melissa. By Tuesday evening, they said more than 280,000 people had already been evacuated to evacuation centers or were staying with relatives or neighbors.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic will also face life-threatening flash flooding and landslides. Three people in Haiti have been killed as a result of the storm, which wiped out nearly 40 acres of maize. One person in the Dominican Republic has also passed. Tropical storm conditions in the two countries will persist through Wednesday.

Melissa marks the third Category 5 storm of the 2025 hurricane season. 

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a U.S.-Israeli military strike, marking a dramatic escalation in hostilities in the Middle East.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that Khamenei was “one of the most evil people in history,” and framed the killing as retribution for Americans and others harmed by Iran’s leadership.

“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran,” Trump wrote, “but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”

Trump added that Khamenei’s killing offered “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”

Khamenei, who ruled Iran’s religious autocracy for more than three decades, is believed to have been killed in a strike in his compound in the capital, Tehran. The 86-year-old's death was confirmed by the state-run IRNA news agency, which did not elaborate on a cause.

His assassination followed years of tensions with successive U.S. and Israeli governments over Iran’s nuclear program, and his refusal to give up his country’s right to develop nuclear energy.

It came just weeks after his security forces brutally crushed widespread protests that first broke out across the country over rampant inflation, but spiralled into broader demonstrations against Khamenei and the Islamic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979.  

Read more: U.S and Israel Launch Strikes on Iran, as Trump Promises ‘Massive and Ongoing’ Campaign

The crackdown killed some 30,000 people, senior health officials told TIME, and spurred President Donald Trump, who had promised to intervene for the protestors, to assemble the U.S. forces that struck Saturday. 

Khamenei was killed in the first wave of U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran on Saturday, in what Trump said would be a “massive and ongoing” campaign aimed at bringing about a change in the country's leadership.

Iran responded by launching a wave of missiles at Israel and other U.S. allies across the region. Explosions were heard in the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi. Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, was also targeted.

Nuclear ambitions

For decades, Israel and the U.S. have tried to pressure Iran with sanctions and threats of military action to give up its uranium enrichment program, accusing it of using its pursuit of nuclear energy as a smokescreen to develop nuclear weapons. 

Khamenei consistently denied that Iran was pursuing a nuclear bomb, but has insisted that the country has the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. Western powers have repeatedly expressed concerns about the levels of enrichment that Tehran has undertaken, which exceed that which is needed for energy purposes. 

U.S. intelligence services assessed that Khamenei abandoned a nuclear weapons program in 2003, in the wake of the invasion of neighboring Iraq, and last year said that it continued to assess that "Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so."

After Israel and the U.S. bombed its sprawling nuclear infrastructure in June 2025, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear capacity had been “obliterated.”

Still, in announcing the U.S. attack on Iran, Trump said Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear weapon in “secret”.

Khamenei came to power in 1989 following the death of Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, making him one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world at the time of his death. 

During his more than three decades as Supreme Leader, he consolidated power over a system of government he had helped create, sidelined a reformist movement, and crushed multiple mass protests that grew more frequent and intense. Ordinary Iranians objected to the country’s intrusive authoritarian system, an economy crippled by devastating international sanctions intended to coerce the regime to curb its nuclear program, and the mullahs’ preoccupation with international affairs.  

Under Khamenei, Tehran made great strides in its mission to “export” the Islamic Revolution, setting up nimble, well-armed proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and riding to the rescue of the Assad regime in Syria. But the network collapsed over the last two years, most catastrophically when Israel decimated Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, clearing the way to June’s direct assault on Iran. By then, Israeli intelligence had planted a bomb in a Revolutionary Guards guest house that, in addition to killing the political leader of Hamas in Gaza, also demonstrated its ability to penetrate the innermost sanctums of the Iranian regime.

'Take over your government'

Trump announced the start of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran at 2:30 a.m. Eastern, declaring the start of a campaign aimed at "eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people."

Trump also addressed the Iranian people.

"Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take," he said in his speech, which was posted on Truth Social.

The strikes on Khamenei's compound are believed to have been among the first of the campaign. Soon, further explosions were heard across the country as both the U.S. and Israel targeted military installations and air defense systems.

Iran responded to the initial attack in the first hours with a barrage of missiles that struck U.S. bases and allies across the region.

Its ballistic missiles and drones appeared to strike not just U.S. military targets across the region, but civilian areas of America’s Gulf allies. Five-star resorts in the glitzy tourist areas of Dubai, apartment buildings in Bahrain, and Kuwait’s international airport were all targeted by missiles, the debris of intercepted missiles, or drones.

Speaking to NBC News from Tehran on Saturday morning, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said “the situation on the ground is—I cannot say normal—life is going on. Everything is under control.”

“In less than two hours we were able to start retaliation by hitting U.S. bases with our missiles,” he said, describing Iranian strikes as “an act of self-defense.”

Video posted online showed the impact of a missile on the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The country’s authorities confirmed the headquarters was hit by a “missile attack” in a statement. 

Qatar, which hosts the Al Udeid Air Base—the largest U.S. base in the region— was targeted by 44 missiles and 8 drones on Saturday, an official briefed on the attacks told Reuters.

Beyond military targets, Iran’s missiles and drones were able to strike civilian areas of those same U.S. allies across the Gulf.

One video showed a blast hit the Palm, the iconic man-made island and resort in Dubai, which attracts wealthy tourists from around the world. The government of Dubai’s Media Office has said an “incident occurred in a building in the Palm Jumeirah area" and four people were injured.

With three months to go until the U.S. midterm elections in November, voters increasingly seem to prefer Democrats over the Republican Party that has had control of Congress for the last two years.

Results of a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday showed that 42% of registered voters would vote for a Democratic congressional candidate at present, compared to 37% for a Republican. 

The same survey also found that, for the first time in nearly a decade of its polling series, voters perceive the Democratic Party as having a better plan for the economy than the Republican Party.

And it’s not the only poll illustrating the diminishing relative appeal of Republicans. As of Aug. 3, the polling average from election data organization Decision Desk HQ shows the Democratic Party holds a 6.7-point lead over the GOP on a generic congressional ballot.

Results of a CNN/SSRS survey released in late July showed Democrats lead Republicans by 8 points on a generic congressional ballot. That’s up from 5 points in January.

Emerson College Polling surveys of likely midterm election voters paint a similar picture. In March, 49% of respondents said they planned to support the Democratic candidate, while 42% said they would vote Republican. By May, Democrats widened that lead by 2 percentage points, and by July, the gap widened by another 2 points to 53% for Democrats and 42% for the GOP.

An Economist/YouGov poll in late July showed Democrats with a 4-point advantage over Republicans, up from 3 points in March.

Republicans’ advantage on the economy has declined during President Donald Trump’s second term, in large part due to the inflationary effects of his tariffs and the U.S.’s war with Iran.

But while some GOP legislators are worried about the President’s priorities hurting their electability, Trump, whose own approval ratings have sunk to historic depths, has shrugged off the polls as fake news. In a Truth Social post Monday, he claimed his “REAL” polling numbers are the “best they have ever been,” adding: “Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt.”