Courtney Love ‘Almost Died’ During Terrifying Health Battle
Courtney Love is opening up about a terrifying health crisis she kept hidden for years — revealing doctors warned her she could die after her weight plunged to around 100 pounds and she lost all of her hair.
The 62-year-old rocker said the frightening ordeal began after she moved to England in 2019, when her health suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse.
“I went to England in 2019 and when I went there, you know, my body just exploded,” Love revealed in an Instagram video shared Friday. “It just exploded, and I was in hospitals a lot. I almost died.”
The Hole frontwoman said her condition became so severe that doctors delivered a grim warning.
“I lost all my hair. I was about 100 pounds, and they told me I was going to die, and I didn’t believe them,” she said.
Love did not reveal exactly what illness or medical condition caused the frightening health battle, but said she spent much of the period going in and out of hospitals.
Despite what doctors were telling her, Love said she refused to accept that she was dying.
She explained that her reaction was tied to a mindset she has carried since childhood — trusting her own instincts even when people around her were telling her something different.
Love described it using an unusual analogy about being told that “red was blue,” saying she learned early on not to automatically believe what others insisted was true.
“So when they said you’re gonna die, I just didn’t believe them,” she said.
Against the odds, Love said her condition eventually improved.
“And somehow, I got better,” she revealed. “I’m healthy, which is amazing.”
The singer said she intentionally kept the frightening ordeal away from the public while it was happening.
“I just wasn’t public about being sick,” Love said. “I don’t want to be public about being sick. You know, I’m fine now.”
She added that things in her life are currently going well and promised fans she plans to return to the spotlight.
“I will be back,” she said.
Love also revealed that while she was battling for her health, she was quietly working on new music — at times believing the album could be the last record she ever made.
“When I made it, I believed this was my last record so I made the record I always wanted to make,” she wrote alongside the video.
Love said she spent most of the period hospitalized, but whenever she was well enough to leave, she threw herself into writing and recording.
“I was in the hospital mostly but when I wasn’t all I did was write & record it,” she wrote.
Now, with her health apparently back on track, Love said one of her biggest goals is getting back onstage.
“I want to tour more than anything,” she said. “& I want to sing.”
The rocker ended her emotional message by thanking fans for giving her time to figure out how she wants to return to public life.
“Thank you for giving me the grace I need to prepare how to enter the world again,” she wrote.
Spain rejects discussing sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla with Morocco
The status of the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla as Spanish territories is not up for discussion, Spanish officials said , after Morocco’s justice minister reiterated Rabat’s sovereignty claims over the cities.
Tuesday’s remarks by Abdellatif Ouahbi to Asharq TV marked the first time Rabat has publicly raised the contentious issue since Ceuta’s border crisis in late July, during which an estimated 72,000 migrants briefly crossed into the enclave. At least 96 people died in the mass border rush.
Ouahbi said his country always raised the issue of the cities’ status in negotiations with Spain, with a long-term goal of achieving a resolution through dialogue.
Since its independence in 1956, Morocco has regarded Ceuta and Melilla as occupied by Spain, arguing sovereignty over them should ultimately be transferred to Rabat. Madrid considers them integral parts of its territory since the 17th and 15th centuries, respectively.
“Ceuta and Melilla aren’t just Spanish; they’re super-Spanish and cannot be touched,” Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles told reporters in Ceuta when asked about Ouahbi’s comments.
“Any attack on Ceuta and Melilla is an attack on Spain as a whole. It must never happen again,” she added, referring to the border crisis.
The Spanish government has largely praised Moroccan authorities for their cooperation in repatriating the migrants, blaming the crisis on people-smuggling mafias.
In a separate statement, Spain’s Foreign Ministry said Spain’s territorial integrity “has not been, and will never be, discussed with anyone”.
Separately, Morocco’s Interior Ministry said on Wednesday it had stepped up security near the borders with Ceuta and Melilla over online calls for another mass crossing attempt on August 15, warning it would prosecute organisers and participants.
“The ministry calls on everyone to remain vigilant and responsible and not to be drawn into such suspicious and misleading calls, given the risks they may pose to people’s lives,” it said in a statement, also urging Spain to accelerate the return of unaccompanied Moroccan minors in Ceuta.
Last week, Spanish Youth Minister Sira Rego said Madrid would evaluate Morocco’s offer to repatriate the children on a case-by-case basis.
Pope renews call to end violence against Palestinians in occupied West Bank
Pope Leo XIV on Sunday renewed his call for an end to violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and urged the international community to advance efforts toward a two-state solution, Anadolu reports.
Speaking after the weekly Angelus prayer, Leo called for an end “to the repeated acts of violence against the Palestinian population of the West Bank,” according to Vatican News.
He also issued an urgent appeal to the international community “to ensure that progress is made toward a two-state solution, for a just and lasting peace.”
READ: Pope Leo voices concern over ‘tragic’ situation in Sudan
The Vatican has consistently maintained that a two-state solution based on secure and internationally recognized borders is the only viable and equitable path toward lasting peace between Palestine and Israel.
The pope also marked the start of the Mediterranean Games in the southern Italian city of Taranto, expressing hope that the sporting event would serve as “a prophetic sign of peace and fraternity among the peoples of this region and of the whole world.”
Athletes from countries in Africa, Asia and Europe bordering the Mediterranean are taking part in the event.
READ: Pope Leo warns ‘winds of war’ again blowing across Middle East, Ukraine
UN Says $50 Million Ransom Fueled al-Qaida’s Expansion Into West Africa
An estimated $50 million ransom paid for a hostage held by al-Qaida-linked members in Mali in late 2025 helped finance the group’s expansion across West Africa and provided money to al-Qaida organizations elsewhere, United Nations experts said.
The UN report did not identify the hostage or who paid the ransom. Three regional sources told Reuters that the United Arab Emirates made the payment following the release of an Emirati citizen and two other foreign hostages from Pakistan and Iran.
The sources did not say whether payments were made for each hostage or describe how the money was transferred.
A UAE official did not directly address the reported payment but said the country remained committed to combating terrorism and extremist financing.
“UAE continues to strengthen its counter-terrorism efforts through active engagement in relevant international and regional frameworks, and through sustained efforts to cut off sources of extremist financing and counter extremist ideology,” the official said.
The report, dated Aug. 10 and posted on the UN website the following day, was prepared by experts monitoring al-Qaida and Islamic State for the UN Security Council.
The experts said most of the approximately $50 million received in 2025 was distributed among armed units of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) an al Qaida-linked coalition operating across the Sahel region of West Africa.
“These funds played a key role in financing the group’s offensive across Mali,” the report said.
JNIM has between 7,000 and 8,000 fighters in the Sahel, approximately half of them in Mali. Its fighters operate in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and farther south in Benin and Togo.
The report said some ransom money also went to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, a JNIM member and al-Qaida’s official North African affiliate. That group transferred some funds to al-Qaida’s core leadership and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
Security sources said foreign hostage ransoms typically range from $4 million to $6 million. The UN experts said JNIM uses kidnappings to generate revenue and weaken public confidence in governments’ ability to provide security.
ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound.
Adam Rose is deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a board member of the Los Angeles Press Club. A longtime journalist, he investigated the scene of the October 2025 incident and attended several of Mr. Parias’s court hearings.
His gulag isn’t in a distant Soviet or banana republic. It’s about an hour and a half from Disneyland, in a small California town called Adelanto.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and detained Parias last October, the Los Angeles-based journalist will cross 300 days in ICE detention on Monday. His horrifying conditions aren’t unique among immigrant detainees, but Parias’s case is extraordinary. Perhaps no journalist has endured such a sustained sequence of violence, prosecution, and imprisonment at the hands of the U.S. government.
Parias long ago surpassed Wolf’s record for the longest known time a journalist had spent in U.S. custody.
He was already prolific on social media when the immigration enforcement surge began last summer. He worked independently as Richard Noticias LA, with over 100,000 followers on TikTok. He built that audience by chasing crime stories across California neighborhoods often overlooked by larger outlets. This time last year, the Los Angeles City Council presented him with a proclamation honoring his efforts.
Federal authorities say Parias is an undocumented immigrant who had previously evaded arrest. But their account does not explain a growing mountain of evidence.
Worms collected from the Adelanto ICE Processing Center’s drinking water after Ricardo Parias called attention to the conditions, photographed on Aug. 3, 2026.Photo: Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
On June 13, 2025, Parias arrived at an immigration raid in South LA ready to film as usual. According to witnesses, a federal agent ran into him with a vehicle. Parias was then handcuffed and left on a sidewalk while the agents continued their work. Videos show him crying out in pain and grasping at his injured leg. Agents never provided medical attention. Eventually, a Good Samaritan pulled up in a private vehicle and took Parias to the hospital. An agent briefly stopped them but let Parias leave — handcuffs still on.
Four months later, Parias was driving along a quiet block near downtown LA. Multiple unmarked vehicles pulled up around him, carrying masked men who turned out to be federal agents. Immediately and without warning, they smashed his window, as bodycam footage later showed. Panicked, Parias stepped on the accelerator — a meaningless move in a small car physically pinned by multiple large SUVs. Tires spun, the vehicles didn’t budge, and Parias quickly took his foot off the gas.
One agent struggled to open the passenger door. He fumbled with his gun, as his own bodycam showed, juggling it back and forth between his hands before shooting Parias in the elbow. A U.S. marshal was also hit and was expected to recover.
As federal immigration agents’ violence once again sent Parias to the hospital, the agents scurried into the security office of a nearby strip mall to check for surveillance footage. They downloaded it onto a thumb drive and deleted it from the mall’s system.
Prosecutors charged Parias with assault on a federal officer, offering a version of events that omitted critical context. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli fired off a social media post suggesting Parias had been trying to avoid deportation agents for months:
“This morning, Parias rammed his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in and ordered him to submit to arrest. Parias, who had previously avoided capture by immigration authorities, refused to comply with agents’ orders and escalated what could have been a simple arrest into a life-threatening situation.”
Essayli’s post included a single screenshot from their lone copy of the mall’s footage. The full video would have painted a very different picture. He didn’t release it.
Evidence wasn’t the only thing withheld from Parias, who was discharged from the hospital days later while still on morphine. Taken directly into a federal criminal detention center in downtown Los Angeles, he was supposed to receive high doses of ibuprofen. Once in court for his initial criminal hearing, the judge learned he wasn’t being given the prescribed treatment for his gunshot wound. The pain caused Parias to twist in his chair. Flummoxed, the judge implored a U.S. marshal to expedite his return to a facility where he could be given medication. The marshal refused.
Moments later, Parias’s lawyer asked the judge if his client’s teenage son — who had not been allowed to communicate with his father since the shooting — could give him a hug. Citing security protocol, the marshal also vetoed this small act of humanity. As Parias was whisked away, his son shouted across the courtroom in Spanish, “te amo” (“I love you”).
Parias was eventually granted bond in his criminal case. But accepting it would have meant marshals turning him over to immigration authorities, who could immediately transfer him to their own distant facility with potentially worse care. He didn’t take the offer.
The government transferred him anyway. Adelanto is difficult to visit, hours from his lawyers and family in Los Angeles, not to mention the court itself. Prosecutors still hadn’t turned over the mall footage. But bystander videos began to undermine the government’s account. The judge ultimately threw out all criminal charges with prejudice, finding that the government had violated Parias’s constitutional rights.
The proceedings to deport Parias continue. For now, he’s stuck in Adelanto.
Even in detention, Parias remains a journalist. The government gave him a new beat. He began reporting on the horrid conditions that he and other detainees endure. Through video recorded by his visitors and accounts relayed to other reporters, Parias exposed the worm-like creatures in drinking water and cockroaches in cells.
His gunshot wound was being treated with vitamin D and Bengay. “What I saw looked like an arm that was on the verge of being amputated,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., who visited Parias at Adelanto in May. His situation inspired her to propose legislation addressing medical neglect in immigration facilities.
The government recently said it plans to ship him even farther away, to a facility in San Diego where he can receive medical care. The move will make it even harder for his family and lawyers to visit — and end his reporting on Adelanto’s rancid conditions.
Parias — and his reporting behind bars — is getting more media attention, but that coverage doesn’t always recognize how this all started because he was doing his job as a journalist.
America has imprisoned journalists before. It has even killed them. But what has happened to Parias is something different: A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.
The government’s powers to enforce immigration laws and prosecute crimes do not erase the First Amendment. Journalists don’t surrender their rights because they lack immigration status. And the government can’t make a journalist disappear simply by locking him in a cell.
At some point, the question stops being what else will happen to Parias. It becomes what America is willing to let happen to a journalist.
US floats prospect of joint strikes on Colombian armed groups
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated on Wednesday the possibility of joint strikes on Colombian armed groups, as he welcomed the nation into a military-led counter-narcotics coalition after its conservative president took over last week.
Colombia had authorized “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terror networks,” Hegseth told a gathering of the U.S.-led Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition in Panama.
“Yes,” he replied when asked if he had discussed with his Colombian counterpart joint strikes against armed groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), which the U.S. designates as a terrorist group, and remnants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
“Designated terrorist organizations, with partnered governments, will be legitimate targets of the United States government,” to include Colombia, Hegseth said when asked if such operations were expected.
President Donald Trump’s Latin American policy has expanded dramatically beyond its early focus on the Panama Canal.
More than 200 people have been killed since the launch of U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats last September, while a U.S.-led commando raid in January deposed Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela.
Critics say the U.S. strikes amount to war crimes worthy of the International Criminal Court, but Hegseth blasted the organization and encouraged coalition allies attending the meeting in Panama to withdraw from it.
He compared drug traffickers to al Qaeda or Islamic State terrorists.
Speaking at a hotel in Panama City, Hegseth invoked a revamped Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century policy asserting U.S. primacy across the Americas that critics associate with decades of U.S. intervention.
He has called it the “Donroe Doctrine” — a play on Trump’s name.
“We will defend our hemisphere from external threats,” including from narco-traffickers and foreign malign influence, Hegseth said.
COLOMBIAN CRACKDOWN
Colombian President Abelardo De La Espriella’s vows of a security crackdown have been embraced by the Trump administration, which announced plans on Friday to provide $1 billion in U.S. security assistance to his government.
During his swearing-in remarks on Friday, De La Espriella vowed to “definitively eradicate the scourge of illicit crops” and committed to also joining the Shield of the Americas program founded by Trump.
De La Espriella has blamed his predecessor, leftist Gustavo Petro, for an expansion of armed groups.
Speaking alongside Hegseth at the event, Colombia’s new Defense Minister Jorge Eduardo Mora, a retired major general, said Colombia could take a critical role in combating narco-traffickers on both its Pacific and Caribbean coasts.
“I think the time has arrived for the narco-terrorist cartels to confront the power and the capabilities of the entire hemisphere, led by the United States,” Mora said.
One U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the new security partnership was expected to surpass the level of cooperation under Plan Colombia, a U.S.-Colombia anti-narcotics initiative launched in the early 2000s.
De La Espriella’s election was part of a rightward shift rippling across Latin America.
In Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Panama and Peru, weak economies and rising crime have reshaped voter priorities, allowing once-fringe hard-right candidates to gain traction by promising crackdowns amid a global rise of right-wing nationalism.
In Panama, Trump’s administration won a major victory from the country’s Supreme Court in January after voicing concerns about encroachment by China. Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, through local unit Panama Ports Company, lost the port concessions it had held for nearly three decades.
The Panama Canal handles 5% of global maritime trade, making control of its entrance ports a flashpoint for tension between Washington and Beijing.
Addressing the meeting, Panama President Jose Raul Mulino called drug trafficking the biggest threat facing the region and dismissed concerns that the U.S.-led coalition could infringe on members’ sovereignty. He made no mention of China.
Instead, he said the transnational crime groups that traffic drugs and people are the real threats to sovereignty.
“There’s never going to be a sustainable peace if this enemy (advances),” Mulino said.
CBS News Star Accused of Shocking Harassment by Colleague
CBS News correspondent Matt Gutman is facing serious accusations from a former ABC News colleague who claims he made sexualized remarks in the workplace, according to a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in California.
Former ABC News field producer Samira Said named Gutman in a complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court against ABC parent company Disney and others.
Said, who worked in ABC News’ Los Angeles bureau from May 2021 until March 2025, is seeking unspecified damages and alleges she faced discrimination, retaliation and a hostile work environment before ultimately losing her job.
Gutman, who previously worked for ABC News before joining CBS News, is mentioned in the lawsuit in connection with two alleged incidents involving inappropriate comments.
According to the complaint, Said was once assigned to a team that included Gutman and two other male crew members when a conversation allegedly turned to the appearance of a female correspondent.
The lawsuit claims Gutman began discussing the woman’s looks and allegedly rated her appearance using a numerical score based on her physical attributes.
Other male members of the crew allegedly joined in, with the lawsuit claiming the group continued discussing the woman’s body and appearance while Said was present.
Said claims the men then tried to pull her into the conversation by asking for her opinion.
She allegedly refused to participate and told them the discussion was inappropriate.
The lawsuit describes a second alleged encounter during a press event for a movie release.
According to Said, she and Gutman disagreed over whether their team should leave the work site.
The complaint claims Gutman then suggested, in front of several coworkers, that Said must have an after-hours date in the city and that was the real reason she did not want to relocate.
Said argues the remark undermined her professional judgment and turned the workplace disagreement into a sexualized stereotype.
The allegations involving Gutman are only one part of Said’s broader lawsuit against ABC and Disney.
Said also claims her relationship with the network deteriorated after she covered the devastating 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
According to the complaint, Said experienced severe psychological symptoms following the assignment while also dealing with lingering effects from COVID-19.
She was reportedly granted medical leave from August 2022 until January 2023.
Said alleges that when her psychiatrist later cleared her to return to work with recommended accommodations, ABC refused those requests and instead required her to return without restrictions and remain available for a full workweek.
She claims she was later reassigned to weekend desk shifts and faced additional negative treatment.
The situation allegedly came to a head in March 2025.
Said claims she suffered a foot injury while covering dangerous weather conditions and reported the injury to the company.
She says she was subsequently fired.
Her lawsuit accuses ABC and Disney of discrimination based on gender, ancestry and disability, as well as retaliation, failure to accommodate her medical needs, hostile work environment harassment and other alleged violations.
The claims have not been proven in court, and the lawsuit represents Said’s allegations.
5 Years After Taliban Takeover, Afghan Women See Their Futures Erased
Saturday marked five years since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, and for the country’s women and girls, the anniversary brought little to commemorate. Arshad Mehmood reports that restrictions initially imposed after the collapse of President Ashraf Ghani’s government have hardened into a sweeping system that excludes women from education, employment and public life.
Girls remain barred from schooling beyond sixth grade. Women face tight controls on movement, dress, work and access to public spaces, often requiring a male guardian simply to leave home. United Nations experts are urging governments not to legitimize the Taliban without measurable, independently verified improvements in human rights.
Behind those policies are lives thrown violently off course. Marzia Imamzadeh, a Hazara Shia refugee who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, fled toward Pakistan after the Taliban takeover and survived an Islamic State Khorasan Province attack on her convoy. A former Afghan women’s volleyball coach, now separated from her children, described struggling to obtain food and medical care while facing possible deportation.
Zala Ahmadi was one semester short of completing a computer science degree at Kabul University when the Taliban closed the door on her education and startup ambitions. She sold her family’s remaining gold jewelry to pay smugglers and now lives undocumented in Pakistan, watching from afar as her younger sisters lose their own educational opportunities.
Other women who escaped Afghanistan—including journalist Tahmina Usmani, former national athlete Marwa Ali and former Supreme Court Judge Tahmina Safi—describe a generation stripped of autonomy, security and hope. Their testimony also exposes a troubling contradiction: Foreign governments condemn Taliban abuses while maintaining political and humanitarian engagement.
Geopolitical analyst Paul Farley warns that excluding women from education and healthcare could leave Afghanistan desperately short of female doctors, nurses and midwives, driving maternal mortality higher. Activist Fariba Akbari says poverty, forced marriage, domestic abuse and deportation fears are feeding a largely overlooked mental health emergency.
Mehmood’s full report gives these women something the Taliban has tried to deny them: a public voice. Read it for the human stories behind five years of gender-based exclusion—and for the warning that silence may allow this system to become permanent.
Wildfire smoke now bigger prenatal threat than human sources of air pollution
In 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.
Since that 1970 law and its amendments were passed, combined emissions of a half-dozen harmful air pollutants from vehicles and industrial sources have decreased by nearly 80 percent.
But mounting evidence shows that pollution from wildfire smoke is eclipsing those air-quality gains. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels is creating warmer, drier conditions that make wildfires more intense and destructive, and blanket communities in toxic smoke that is more harmful than pollution from other sources.
Now, a new study shows that smoke from wildfires is also reversing the health benefits of reducing air pollution for society’s most vulnerable population: babies in the womb.
Increasing wildfire activity is “systematically offsetting prenatal air quality gains” from reducing emissions from vehicles, refineries, factories and other human sources, researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park, report in the study, published Thursday in Frontiers in Environmental Health.
Low-income, rural and Indigenous populations bore the disproportionate burden of wildfire’s contribution to poor air quality, the authors found.
The major contribution of the study is its focus on a “very specific population that is quite at risk for adverse health outcomes,” said senior author Michel Boudreaux, associate professor of health policy and management. “We were looking at infants that were born and what their exposure was like during the prenatal period.”
Prenatal exposure to wildfire smoke significantly increases the likelihood that babies will be born too early or too small, raising their risk of dying early or developing chronic respiratory conditions and other diseases later in life.
The University of Maryland team studied how wildfire smoke and human sources of air pollution changed across the contiguous United States between 2003 and 2019, looking at air pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency and live birth records. (The EPA datasets do not include years beyond 2019.)
To understand how much wildfire smoke contributed to unhealthy air exposures for unborn babies, the team used computer models to estimate exposures to fine particle pollution, or PM2.5, from both human sources, such as cars and industry, and natural sources, like wildfires. The team modeled air quality without emissions from fires to calculate how much of that total pollution came from wildfires.
The researchers obtained data for nearly 65 million babies born over 16 years and determined how many days they were exposed in the womb to the EPA threshold for unhealthy air.
Average daily prenatal exposure to air pollution from human sources dropped by 37 percent during that time, the analysis found, but contributions from wildfires doubled, offsetting those gains.
Although the study does not integrate data on preterm birth, birthweight or other outcomes, it is a very good exposure-characterization study, said Ilona Jaspers, an inhalation toxicologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study.
“What this study does do well is confirm and expand the well-established finding that ambient PM2.5 in the United States is increasingly wildfire-dominated, offsetting Clean Air Act gains, but applies a birth-weighted lens to it,” she said.
Wildfire smoke exposures are likely to have vast public health consequences, Jaspers said. In previous studies, Jaspers and her colleagues used prescription insurance claim data to show that exposure during specific perinatal periods can lead to childhood respiratory diseases.
The research doesn’t look at how much time the mother was spending outside, if she wore an N95 mask or if she had an air-filtration system in her home, which Boudreaux acknowledges as a limitation of the study. But data sources like Purple Air that track wildfire smoke are detecting a large amount of pollution in the form of a PM2.5 inside people’s homes, he said.
The new study highlighted regions and populations that were disproportionately affected by wildfire smoke. In the West and Northwest, wildfires’ contributions to air pollution more than doubled over the study period. And the communities where wildfires are responsible for the largest reversals in air quality—low-income, rural and American Indian and Alaska Native populations—often have the least access to neonatal care.
Since exposure to wildfire smoke early in life can cause life-long health problems, reducing exposure in the prenatal period will yield long-term benefits, Boudreaux said.
The last six years have seen several catastrophic fires in the West and Canada, Boudreaux said. If the team were to extend the study through 2026, he said, they’d likely see wildfires make an even higher contribution to unhealthy prenatal exposures. But that’s just speculation, he cautioned.
What is clear, he said, is that wildfire smoke now accounts for an increasing share of “acute, massive air pollution days” that endanger babies’ health. “What that tells me is that the next frontier is how do we help people manage exposure to wildfire smoke, which is a different kind of exposure than ambient pollution from other sources.”
That means providing communities with resources like clean-air shelters, air filters and better access to healthcare when they are exposed, he said. Ultimately, he said, “we should be asking, are there things we can do to reduce the risk of climate change in general?”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Less than a month after the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) in Johnson’s Capitol Hill office.
In their private meeting after the photo above was taken, Johnson gave Netanyahu a Bible study pamphlet that contains Jewish tropes and proclaims the foundational antisemitic blood libel of deicide: the claim not just that some Jews were involved in Jesus’s crucifixion, but that all Jews are culpable.
Although the pamphlet and accompanying videos are supportive of Israel, they repeat the antisemitic claim, long renounced by major world religions, that Israel, the Jews, killed Jesus.
The two-part Bible study was a treatise urging US politicians to take Israel’s side. The two lessons had been distributed to congressional and White House Bible-study groups starting the day after Israel launched a sustained attack on Iran last year, when the push was on for the US to join in.
The two-part lessons were posted online on June 13 and 14, 2025. It’s not that the two pamphlets were written that quickly; they were recycled.
Capitol Ministries — which runs Bible studies for the House, Senate, White House, and governors — often reuses previous lessons, or repurposes them in the context of current events. The Israel lessons were resurrected to make a Biblical case for the US to join Israel’s new offensive.
For instance, the June 13, 2025, study guide notes that, “Given ongoing attention to Israel and Gaza, I thought this would be a good time to provide a biblical primer as to why you and our nation should remain staunch allies of Israel.” That language has been in there since at least October 18, 2021.
And the same Bible study pamphlet has been warning about Iran’s “nearly-enriched nuclear threat” since 2011.
So, over the years, many influential leaders in the Trump administration and the Republican Congress may have seen the recycled Israel lessons.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has been involved with Capitol Ministries and its leaders, Ralph and Danielle Drollinger, for more than ten years.
“Ralph and Danielle are there to instruct, admonish, encourage, exhort and inspire elected officials to lead their lives and conduct themselves in a way that brings glory to God,” Thune said in 2015, “to remind us of what is important, what our priorities should be.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participates in the Capitol Ministries White House Bible studies, the Pentagon confirmed to me last year.
On June 21, 2025, about a week after the Bible studies, President Donald Trump launched three separate strikes against nuclear targets in Iran.
Then, the following month, Netanyahu came to Washington. His itinerary before meeting with Trump at the White House included a stop at Johnson’s office
Spectrum News reported that, after the meeting, Netanyahu said, “First comes strength, then comes the peace.”
Johnson issued a brief statement about the meeting, but neither man shared everything that transpired. Some details Johnson saved for the 2025 annual report of Capitol Ministries.
In a quotation accompanying the same picture from his office that he used for his social-media post, Johnson gave Capitol Ministries a more substantive account of what happened at the meeting.
This photo of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s visit to my office last summer was taken right before I shared with him a copy of Ralph’s two-part Bible study on “The Biblical Case for Defending Israel.” We discussed it at some length and Bibi left with a copy.
CapMin is an invaluable resource that I and countless other members greatly appreciate. The solid weekly Bible studies are always timely and applicable to our personal lives, as well as our vocational decisions.
Photo: Office of the Speaker of the House / X
The first of Drollinger’s two Israel study guides argues that the US should help Israel even though it’s in a time-out for killing Jesus:
“[T]he spiritual blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant accrue to the Church for a time (until God grafts Israel back in) due to the present apostasy of Israel, having executed the Messiah.”
Highlighted excerpt of Capitol Ministries study guide.
In a video for Part 2, Drollinger argues that the Bible says Jews were only “sidetracked” by God. For crucifying Jesus.
“Israel has stumbled. They’re on the side track of God’s plan as He grafts in the gentiles into His kingdom. And they’ve been sidetracked because they crucified their messiah.”
The pamphlets for both parts of that lesson list Johnson, among many other Republicans1, as sponsors.
Excerpts from Capitol Ministries Bible study guide, The Biblical Case for Defending Israel, Part 1. Imaage: Screenshot / Capitol Ministries PDF.
Neither Johnson’s office nor the Israeli embassy in Washington responded to emails requesting confirmation and comment.
You might think Capitol Hill media might have learned about and reported a lengthy discussion between the US House speaker and Israel’s prime minister about the biblical case for the US to side with Israel. Especially when that argument stipulates that the Jews killed Jesus.
And especially when Drollinger has made news before with derogatory statements about women, Catholics and LGBTQ+ people.
It wasn’t even the first evangelical shadow diplomacy Johnson has engaged in with huge stakes. His meetings with Ukraine’s Fellowship Foundation point man, unreported at the time, led to Johnson supporting Ukraine aid.
Nevertheless, for whatever reason, Johnson bringing Drollinger’s teachings into his Netanyahu meeting has not been previously reported. I only learned about it going through the annual report.
And it’s not the first time this issue has arisen on Capitol Hill in recent years. Johnson has a complicated history when it comes to references to deicide.
In 2024, Senaator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) was trying to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act to enact legal definitions of antisemitism. Jewish Insider reported that Schumer, the majority leader at the time, believed an unnamed Republican senator would force a floor vote on an amendment to exempt deicide from the definitions.
Calling Jews Christ-killers, in other words, would not be considered antisemitism under the law.
So Schumer went to Johnson, who had already got the bill through the House, for help. He asked Johnson about attaching the bill to a much bigger one, military spending, to block the deicide amendment from getting a potentially divisive floor debate. Schumer feared such a debate could make things worse for American Jews.
But the bill’s inclusion of deicide had already prompted blowback from the Christian right. Charlie Kirk suggested, falsely, that the bill had outlawed parts of the Bible. Tucker Carlson responded: “Yes. The New Testament.”
Reportedly, Johnson told Schumer no, he wouldn’t add the antisemitism legislation to the military spending bill.
We still don’t know which senator was set to push a deicide amendment but, in April 2025, The Forward reported that Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) was pushing one. Cassidy’s been a Drollinger sponsor since 2013.
Without the amendment, Representative Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) voted against the bill because it defined blaming Jews for the crucifixion as antisemitism:
This statement is not antisemitic; it is a biblical and historical fact, as Jesus was a Jew.
I sincerely wish I could have supported this bill, as I have always opposed antisemitism, but I cannot approve of any measure that mischaracterizes what the Bible says as bigoted or hateful.
The bill died when a slew of bipartisan amendments cost it majority support.
As I reported last year, Johnson had only become a sponsor of Drollinger’s House Bible study in May 2025, the month before the Israel Bible lessons. Just a couple months before, Trump administration leaders had revived the weekly White House cabinet meetings of the Bible study.
One of those leaders was Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, now being sued for proselytizing to her staff. The other was Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
During Vought’s 2017 confirmation hearing, he stood by a previous published statement that Muslims “stand condemned” for not accepting Jesus as their savior.
When Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) asked whether Jews also stand condemned, Vought said he was writing about his school, Wheaton, which “has a statement of faith that speaks clearly with regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation.”
There’s no public indication of whether Johnson is being influenced by Drollinger’s teachings, or sponsors the Bible studies because those teachings reflect his own, previously held beliefs.
In 2024, for instance, Johnson was asked whether he believed in a biblical rationale for aiding Israel.
Q: Do you also think that there’s a moral or biblical rationale for the US to be supporting Israel at this time?
JOHNSON: Sure. It’s my personal belief it begins in the first book of the Bible, the Torah, and Genesis, where it says very clearly that God will bless the nation that blesses Israel and curse the nation that curses Israel. So, whether you look at this as a matter of faith, whether you look at it in purely pragmatic reasons, it’s very important, very important for us to support Israel as the only stable democracy in the Middle East. … For some of us it goes even deeper than that because it is a matter of faith.
That’s in line with Drollinger’s teachings. Here’s the short version of Drollinger’s biblical exegesis as outlined in the lessons that Johnson shared last year with Netanyahu:
God made a promise to Israel — the Abrahamic Covenant — that applied to the whole world. Israel’s allies would be blessed, her enemies cursed.
Some Christians argue that the crucifixion voided God’s promise, meaning nations didn’t have to worry about God anymore when they dealt with Israel. Drollinger attributes this belief, in part, to antisemitism: A rationale for hating Jews and acting against Israel.
Drollinger teaches an alternate view. Yes, he says, the Jews killed Jesus. In his words, “Israel … executed their messiah.” (Most major religions have renounced this view.) But …
… God’s not done with Israel, Drollinger argues. God has merely put Israel in time out until the end of the story, when Jews are prophesied to play a part again (by converting to Christianity or being damned for eternity). So the Abrahamic Covenant, with blessings for Israel’s allies and curses for her enemies, remains in effect.
In other words, Drollinger perpetuates the claim of deicide. He just argues that it shouldn’t be held against Israel.
Drollinger shared his thoughts about Israel killing Jesus in the course of his twovideos about his Israel Bible studies.
Drollinger’s Bible study includes other tropes about Israel that are also considered antisemitic, even though they’re superficially complimentary. Israel’s smart, Drollinger says. And good with money.
Drollinger has even written that he was in the gallery when Netanyahu urged a 2015 joint session of Congress to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Drollinger wrote that he “enthusiastically joined in the thundering applause.”
Ironically, the year before Netanyahu’s congressional speech that Drollinger attended, Netanyahu addressed the United Nations, touching on antisemitism.
As Netanyahu explained, “For centuries the Jewish people have been demonized with blood libels and charges of deicide.”
The Anti-Defamation League agrees, calling it a “myth” to blame Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion:
The myth that Jews collectively murdered Jesus, also referred to as “deicide,” has been used to justify violence against Jews for centuries. Historians as well as Christian leaders have agreed that the claim is baseless.
A range of Jewish and secular groups and leaders last year condemned the Bible study for repeating the deicide slur.
Still, Israeli officials have understood for years that evangelical Christian support in the US is based in some measure on the wish to fulfill biblical prophecy. Johnson’s presentation to Netanyahu is only the latest confirmation of how important the Bible is to US foreign policy.
US evangelical Christian politicians may have nothing against Jews personally and may love Netanyahu’s policies. Or they may be fervidly antisemitic, harboring poisonous views of Jewish people. Either way, Drollinger’s theology perpetuates the charge of deicide, antisemitism’s original sin, but it also requires Israel to be intact for Jesus to return.
These kinds of belief are wildly underappreciated throughout American culture and government.
After the US joined Israel’s attack on Iran last year, for instance, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation received reports from service members about commanders celebrating the arrival of the End Times:
[T]he commander and his wife spent most of the Bible study yesterday in excessive and extreme glorification and overall celebration of the sudden attack on Iran by American forces and all of the other matters connected to the Israeli attacks on Iran…. They had big fat grins on their faces as they assured us that the “End Times” were now here just as heralded and predicted in the New Testament Book of Revelation.
According to Drollinger, his students in Congress and the cabinet are already predisposed toward Israel, often as part of their culturally Christian backgrounds. His lessons just provide a biblical basis, he says.
[W]e need to buoy the convictions of our members based upon Scriptural truths … so that, when push comes to shove, they know why they believe they’re pro-Israel: from what the Bible says.”
Recently, congressional Democrats have proved much more willing to buck Israel’s interests, voting in growing numbers against US arms for Israel.
Republicans, Drollinger says, base their support for Israel on the Bible. Democrats tempt their own ruin abandoning Israel:
[W]e see one political party for the most part basing their policies on the Mosaic law, the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, and we see another one, increasingly — no matter what the matter is — it’s contrary to the Ten Commandments in their basis for reasoning, which is really shaky ground and it could demolish a political party that continues to do that …. The views that they hold are not tied to Mosaic law.
Of course, representatives in both parties swear to uphold the Constitution, not Mosaic law.
And Drollinger insists he’s not a Christian nationalist, not a Dominionist. He opposes both, and opposes theocracy, because, he says, the Bible does, too. He just wants as many elected officials as possible to base their votes and policies on God’s will.
Independent journalist Jonathan Larsen formerly was an executive producer at MSNBC, where he helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes, and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. This and other articles can be read at Jonathan Larsen’s Substack.
