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      The Florida activist poised to become the first Gen Z member of Congress – video

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      Maxwell Frost, at just 25 years old, has won a competitive primary in Florida’s heavily Democratic 10th congressional district. That gives him a strong chance of becoming a member of the US House of Representatives – and the first generation Z candidate to do so. Before his victory, the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland met him during his campaign to talk about why he decided to enter the race and what he hopes  to achieve as in Congress 

      ‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of Congress More

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      The Florida activist hoping to become the first Gen Z member of Congress – video

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      Maxwell Frost, at just 25 years old, has won a competitive primary in Florida’s heavily Democratic 10th congressional district. That gives him a strong chance of becoming a member of the US House of Representatives – and the first generation Z candidate to do so. Before his victory, the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland met him during his campaign to talk about why he decided to enter the race and what he hopes  to achieve as in Congress 

      ‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of Congress More

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      ‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of Congress

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      Interview‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of CongressAndrew Lawrence Maxwell Alejandro Frost has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the gun-control activist has won a Democratic primary in Florida – but he still drives a taxi to make ends meet. Can he now make history?It’s been a decade since Maxwell Alejandro Frost launched his first big campaign. He was 15 years old, coming off a stint volunteering on Barack Obama’s reelection bid and desperate to attend the president’s second inauguration. In an online search for tickets, Frost stumbled across a page soliciting applications to perform in the inaugural parade. So he submitted what he thought was the perfect act to represent central Florida, the region he calls home: his nine-piece high-school salsa band, Seguro Que Sí (translation: “of course”). “I got some videos together, wrote about our band and how we would love to represent Florida and specifically the growing Latino population,” says Frost. Weeks later, he received a call while in class from the inaugural committee inviting his band to play if they could get a US senator to vouch for them and fund the trip to Washington DC themselves. When Frost totted up the costs of transport, lodging, food and the band’s float, he arrived at a figure of $13,000. His headteacher told him the school did not have the funds or the pull to make the trip happen and suggested backing out. But Frost was undaunted.He spent his Thanksgiving break doorstepping local businesses for donations and raised $5,000. He blitzed the office of Bill Nelson, Florida’s ranking US senator, with beseeching phone calls and, after two weeks, had his recommendation letter. Eventually, Frost’s school had a change of heart and added a matching pledge. Impressed, the inaugural committee picked up the cost of the float.On inauguration day, there was no missing Seguro Que Sí as they glided down Pennsylvania Avenue in matching black overcoats and red scarves, with Frost leading on the timbales. No sooner had the president and first lady heard them than they shot up from their seats to sway along. For Frost, the moment is a testament to the power of community organising. “Me and a bunch of teenagers got our band to DC, and we made the president dance,” Frost says. “I’ve always had these crazy ideas. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t.”Frost’s latest folly, running for a seat in the House of Representatives, seems to be working out so far, too. Last month he emerged from a field of 10 Democrats to comfortably win the primary for Florida’s 10th congressional district, which comprises a sizeable chunk of Orlando. This is after Val Demings, the thrice-elected Democratic incumbent, stepped down to challenge Marco Rubio’s US Senate seat.In a state where politics are increasingly defined by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other old, conservative white men, Frost cuts against the grain. An Afro-Cuban progressive who is barely old enough to legally hire a car, Frost fights for universal healthcare and against gun violence. (Which is to say: he’d fit right in with The Squad.) He wasn’t born into a political dynasty or educated at an Ivy League university. He was adopted at birth and went to college online – “before it was cool,” jokes the political science major, who is still a few credits short of finishing his degree. And despite raising more than $1.5m for the campaign, more than any candidate in the race by a wide margin, Frost doesn’t come from means. To make ends meet, he drives for Uber. In between, he keeps fuelled with a steady diet of egg, cheese and avocado sandwiches. (“I love breakfast sandwiches,” he gushes.) He hopes his campaign motivates more regular people to run for office.If Frost wins his seat in the midterm elections in November, it won’t just be a victory for the working class. It will also mark the first time a member of generation Z is voted to Congress. (Aged 25, he’s just old enough to legally run.) Ask Frost why he is chasing history instead of making TikToks, swiping right and otherwise whiling away his youth, and he will cite the inspiration he took from Amanda Litman, a former Hillary Clinton aide and founder of Run For Something, an organisation that encourages young progressives to enter politics. “She said: ‘You don’t run for office at 25 years old because it’s the next step in your career, or the thing you’ve been planning since you were in kindergarten or college. You run because there was a problem so piercing driving you, and you can’t imagine doing anything else with your time,’” he says. “For me, that encapsulates it. There’s so much work that needs to happen.”Frost has been at it for a while. After the school shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, he started an organisation to end gun violence – a scourge that has become such a constant during his life that he refers to generation Z by a different name: “the mass shooting generation.” Even his post-primary mini-break to Charleston, South Carolina, was rocked by a pair of Labor Day weekend shootings – one downtown that left five people injured, and another that sent a 13-year-old to hospital.In recent years in Florida alone, there has been the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, (where 14 students and three staff members were killed), and the 2016 shooting at the gay Orlando nightclub, Pulse (which killed 49 people). Besides Obama’s reelection, Frost has volunteered on the political campaigns of Clinton and Bernie Sanders and worked for the ACLU. In 2018, he helped to pass Florida amendment 4, which restored voting rights to 1.5 million Floridians with felony convictions.Frost’s political endorsements run the gamut from Sanders to Parkland survivor David Hogg to the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, which fights for gun reform and abortion rights. But it was while he was national organising director of March for Our Lives – the group formed by Parkland student survivors – that Frost announced himself as a political star who would not be intimidated by gun-rights champions.He recounts how, while on a barnstorming awareness tour called Road to Change, he and his fellow activists were tailed by a group called the Utah Gun Exchange in an armoured car. It was scary, he says: “Like, wow, I’m travelling with a bunch of school shooting survivors, and these people are brandishing weapons. One day we were just like: ‘Screw it.’ We parked the bus, walked back there and started talking to them.” That led to long conversations and even agreements on some things, such as background checks. It is moments like these that give Frost the confidence that he can reach across the aisle and forge bonds that yield meaningful legislation. But when those respectful conversations can’t happen, Frost won’t hesitate to force the issue. If elected, he says he will push for a ban on assault weapons, dismantle the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun lobbies, and create a national gun-violence taskforce made up of young, Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) representatives.Three months ago, Frost created a national stir when he confronted Florida governor DeSantis at an Orlando event after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. In a widely circulated video posted on his Twitter page, Frost can be seen haranguing DeSantis to do something about gun violence. “Nobody wants to hear from you,” DeSantis sniffs, as Frost is escorted away. “I’m not afraid to pull up,” Frost says. “I have been Maced. I’ve been to jail for talking about what I believe in. So the threshold for un-comfortability is higher than the average person’s.”Despite his obvious maturity, Frost is prepared to follow in the august tradition of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin and other young politicians who have been pilloried for acting their age. His youth is an obvious line of attack for his Republican opponent, Calvin Wimbish, a 72-year-old former Green Beret, who was carrying out intelligence operations in Iraq while Frost was still wearing GapKids clothes. But Frost isn’t about to straighten up for any opponent; if they go low, he’ll limbo lower. “You’re gonna see me at concerts,” he says. “You’re gonna see me drumming. You’re gonna see me dancing. I was just at a library, and somebody came up to me and said: ‘I saw you dancing on stage on election day and it made me really happy to see a politician dancing.’“We’ve been conditioned to think politicians should behave a certain way. That’s why I danced on that stage after my speech. I want to give people a little taste of me and demystify the whole thing for them. I am you, you are me; I’m a small piece of a bigger puzzle.”As an Afro-Cuban on the campaign trail, Frost runs the risk of being othered by potential voters in either group. But beneath his mixed heritage and adoption story is a lot of common ground. His adoptive mother came to the US as a child in the 1960s, via a Freedom Flight from Cuba, with his grandmother and aunt; between them, they had one suitcase and no money. His childhood is full of fond memories of sumptuous food and weekend trips to south Florida. Frost’s adoptive father, a white Kansan, was a full-time steel pan player who introduced him to John Coltrane and Earth, Wind & Fire, and gifted him a drum kit in the second grade. “Not to get too deep, but when he showed me the wonder of culture, art and music, it changed my life,” Frost says. “It opened me up to what it means to be vulnerable and what it means to allow art to make you vulnerable.”Frost did not anticipate his rising political profile would result in him running for office this soon. Even as Democratic operatives recruited Frost after Demings announced her intention to unseat Rubio, Frost was content working in the grassroots. But then last July, Frost reconnected with his biological mother. Among other things, she disclosed that she had been battling with drugs, crime and poverty when Frost was born. “What made the conversation even more powerful was that I never meant to have it,” he says. “Not because I hated her, but because I was living my life.” She explained that she had given up Frost for adoption not to give him a chance for a better life, but to spare him for something even greater. After their chat Frost was convinced: he was running for Congress.So far, the Frost campaign’s biggest gains have come the old-fashioned way, through a disciplined and methodical ground game. He has been especially deliberate about canvassing the University of Central Florida and its 70,000 students, many of them in-state local people. “We had Nights for Frost, with a group of young people knocking on doors,” he says. “We did ‘dorm storms’ multiple times. All too often people write off the youth vote because it hasn’t performed as much as other [groups]. But we also have to recognise that there are so many structural barriers that impact young people going to vote. We have a lot of work to do that spans beyond registering voters. It’s not just talking to people when they’re 18, but talking to people when they’re 16, 14 – creating lifelong advocates, not just waiting until they’re 18.” Frost doesn’t just understand where young people are coming from; he’s in the same boat. He lives with his girlfriend and his sister. When they were priced out of their apartment last October, he couch-surfed and slept in his car for a month before he found a new place. “I couldn’t go back home because my 97-year-old grandmother lives there, and this was in the middle of the Delta variant,” he says.Now in a new apartment, he is splitting $2,100 a month rent, which is still too high, he says. He has made up his mind to move out when the lease expires in November, potentially leaving him unhoused on election day. If he wins, he says he wouldn’t get paid until February at the earliest. Technically, he could take a stipend from his campaign fund now, but he would rather not give the Wimbish campaign or its allies any ammunition. To soften the potential blow to come, he hit the Uber trail hard and completed 60 rides one weekend. This is in between pulling 70-hour weeks on the campaign. So when he talks with urgency about the affordable housing crisis, it’s real. “There’s still a lot of barriers for working-class people to run for office,” he says. “I want to be the voice who shows how messed up it is and help demystify the process.”When it comes to considering his potential political legacy, though, to hear Frost tell it, if he does his job right, he won’t be in it for long. “I want to live in a world where you don’t have to care about politics,” he says, “where these political clubs just don’t exist. March for Our Lives doesn’t exist. MSNBC is irrelevant. TV is all about entertainment because the government is working for you. Yeah, that’s utopian, but it’s what we need to work toward.”TopicsUS politicsFloridaDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      FBI searched Trump Mar-a-Lago home over ‘likely’ efforts to hide classified files, justice department says

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      FBI searched Trump Mar-a-Lago home over ‘likely’ efforts to hide classified files, justice department saysCourt filing alleges files were found despite Trump lawyers saying all documents had been returned The FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after it obtained evidence there was probably an effort to conceal classified documents in defiance of a grand jury subpoena and despite his lawyers suggesting otherwise, the justice department said in a court filing.The recounting – contained in a filing from the justice department that opposed Trump’s request to get an independent review of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago – amounted to the most detailed picture of potential obstruction of justice outlined to date by the government.“Efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the justice department alleged in its filing on Tuesday night.Among the new revelations in the 36-page filing were that FBI agents recovered three classified documents from desks inside Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago and additional classified files from a storage room, contrary to what the former president’s lawyers indicated to the justice department.The justice department said in the submission that, after a Trump lawyer in May accepted service of a subpoena for materials removed from the White House, the lawyer and Trump’s records custodian in June gave the government a single Redweld legal envelope, double-taped, that contained the documents.As Trump’s lawyer and custodian turned over the folder to Jay Bratt, the justice department’s chief counterintelligence official, the custodian produced and signed a letter certifying a “diligent search” had been conducted and all documents responsive to the subpoena were being returned.The lawyer for the former president also stated to Bratt that all the records in the envelope had come from one storage room at Mar-a-Lago, that there were no other records elsewhere at the resort, and that all boxes of materials brought from the White House had been searched, the justice department said.The custodian who signed the letter has been identified by two sources familiar with the matter as Christina Bobb, a member of Trump’s in-house counsel team, though a copy of the letter reproduced by the justice department in the filing redacted the custodian’s name. But the FBI subsequently uncovered evidence through multiple sources that classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago in defiance of the subpoena, and that other government records were “likely” concealed and removed from the storage room, according to the filing.The justice department said in its submission that the evidence – details of which were redacted in the search warrant affidavit partially unsealed last week – allowed it to obtain a warrant to enter Mar-a-Lago, where FBI agents found more classified documents in Trump’s private office.“The government seized 33 items of evidence, mostly boxes,” from its search of Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, the filing said. “Three classified documents that were not located in boxes, but rather were located in the desks in the ‘45 Office’, were also seized.”Illustrating the contents of the 8 August seizure, in an exhibit resembling how the justice department would show the results of a drug bust, the filing included a photo of the retrieved documents emblazoned with classification markings including “top secret” and “secret” designations.The justice department added that the documents collected most recently by the FBI included materials marked as “sensitive compartmented information”, while other documents were so sensitive that the FBI counterintelligence agents reviewing the materials needed additional security clearances.“That the FBI,” the filing said, “recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform, calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification.”After painting an extraordinary portrait of the hurdles that the justice department had to overcome to even recover the documents that belong to the government, prosecutors argued that Trump had no basis to seek the appointment of a so-called special master to review the files.The request for a special master in this case fails, the filing argued, because Trump is attempting to use the potential for executive privilege to withhold documents from the executive branch – which the supreme court decided in Nixon v GSA did not hold.The justice department added that even if Trump could somehow successfully assert executive privilege, it would not apply to the current case because the documents marked classified were seized as part of a criminal investigation into the very handling of the documents themselves.Trump is expected to press on with his request for a special master and to obtain a more detailed list of materials taken from Mar-a-Lago, according to a source close to his legal team, which also disputed that the justice department’s filing raised the likelihood for an obstruction charge.On Tuesday morning, before the justice department filed its response minutes before a court-imposed midnight deadline, Trump added a third lawyer, the former Florida solicitor general Christopher Kise, to his outside legal team, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. TopicsDonald TrumpFBIMar-a-LagoFloridaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Artemis generation’: Nasa to launch first crew-rated rocket to moon since 1972

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      ‘Artemis generation’: Nasa to launch first crew-rated rocket to moon since 1972Test flight that will have no human crew aboard aims to return humans to the moon and eventually land them on Mars For the first time in 50 years, Nasa on Monday is planning to launch the first rocket that can ferry humans to and from the moon.The giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is scheduled to take off from Nasa’s Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex at 8.33am ET (1.33pm UK time) atop an unmanned Orion spacecraft that is designed to carry up to six astronauts to the moon and beyond.The 1.3m mile Artemis I test mission – slated to last 42 days – is aiming to take the Orion vehicle 40,000 miles past the far side of the moon, departing from the same facility that staged the Apollo lunar missions half a century ago.Artemis 1 rocket: what will the Nasa moon mission be carrying into space?Read moreNasa’s Space Shuttle program in the intermediary launched manned missions orbiting the earth in relatively near outer space before its discontinuation in 2011. Private American space companies such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have since flown missions similar to the shuttle program. But Artemis I’s job is to begin informing Nasa whether the moon can act as a springboard to eventually send astronauts to Mars, which would truly bring the stuff of science fiction to life.US taxpayers are expected to put up $93bn to finance the Artemis program. But in the days leading up to Monday’s launch, Nasa administrators insisted that Americans would find the cost to be justified.“This is now the Artemis generation,” the Nasa administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Bill Nelson said recently. “We were in the Apollo generation. This is a new generation. This is a new type of astronaut.”For Monday’s debut, the only “crew members” aboard Orion are mannequins meant to let Nasa evaluate its next-generation spacesuits and radiation levels – as well as a soft Snoopy toy meant to illustrate zero gravity by floating around the capsule.TopicsNasaSpaceThe moonMarsFloridaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Florida

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      How the Republican governor is turning the swing state into a right-wing laboratory.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who appears to be preparing to run for president in 2024, has achieved a national platform by leaning into cultural battles. He signed laws limiting what teachers can teach about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, and he recently suspended an elected prosecutor who said he would refuse to enforce the state’s anti-abortion laws.DeSantis is up for re-election in November. I spoke to my colleague Patricia Mazzei, who as The Times’s Miami bureau chief has tracked his rise, about how DeSantis has changed life in Florida.German: Where do you see DeSantis’s impact on Florida?Patricia: He was elected by just 32,000 votes or so but has governed as if he had a mandate to reshape the state into a laboratory for right-wing policies.Tuesday’s primary didn’t have big-name Republicans on the ballot, so DeSantis got involved in school board races. These are traditionally nonpartisan and sleepy. But he endorsed 30 candidates, and he campaigned for them. And he succeeded: So far, 20 of his endorsed candidates have won outright, and five are going to runoffs.This is an example of trying to turn the state red — not just at the top level, but by starting at the bottom. That builds the bench of candidates who will back him as they go on to make their own political careers. It’s leaving a longer-lasting legacy of the policies and politics he espouses. School board decisions affect parents’ and their children’s lives on a daily basis by deciding what will be in school curriculums.The focus on schools reminds me of the quote from the conservative Andrew Breitbart that “politics is downstream from culture” — meaning that to win elections, partisans first need to shape culture. Changing what the next generation learns about seems like a clear attempt to change the culture, as does DeSantis signing an education bill that critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” law.I went to one of the campaign events for these school boards last weekend in Miami-Dade County. There, the lieutenant governor — DeSantis’s running mate — said, “Our students should go to school to learn their ABC’s, not their L.G.B.T.’s.”But Florida is not entirely a red state. For example, Miami is often called a gay mecca. How do you reconcile that with DeSantis signing the education law?Generally speaking, the people of Florida are less conservative than their leaders. We’ve seen that in statewide ballot initiatives: Voters went against gerrymandering, passed medical marijuana legalization and a minimum wage hike, and restored ex-felons’ voting rights.It’s just a contradiction in the politics. People who live in strictly red or strictly blue areas of the country may not know this. But where I am, if you go into a family gathering, party, anything, you never assume that everybody thinks the way you do. Even in cities like Miami or Orlando, where people are more liberal, your co-worker, neighbor, cousin and parents may have diametrically opposed political views.How has DeSantis succeeded in this environment? The typical formula has been to act as a moderate, but DeSantis has openly embraced the hard right.He has long been a Trump supporter and was a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus when he was in Congress. He got elected governor in 2018 by winning Trump’s endorsement and running a tongue-in-cheek ad with a jaunty tune and DeSantis exhorting his oldest child to “build the wall” with toy blocks.But he governed his first year by trying to lie low.Then came the pandemic. He tried to keep the state open, and he seemed to take criticisms of his looser pandemic policies personally. He started to score political points by portraying himself as a foe of the “corporate media” that conveyed virus restrictions endorsed by public health experts.You can talk to independents, even Democrats, who may not necessarily vote for him, but they remember the lasting impact DeSantis’s policies had on their children, that they could go to school. They are happy they were able to keep their businesses open.Is there a political risk for DeSantis’s re-election campaign in overreaching?He has so many advantages built in for him. He’s got a lot of money right now. He’s got Republicans down the ticket who are all going to campaign with him and for him. His party is much more organized in Florida, and it has a better operation to get their voters to the polls than the Democrats. It’s a governor election in a midterm year, during which Florida has reliably gone red for almost three decades.So even if there’s a feeling of overreach, is that enough for him to lose? Well, Democrats see a narrow path to victory. But it’s unlikely — it’s an uphill climb.More on Patricia Mazzei: She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and decided to become a reporter after working as a student journalist at the University of Miami, where a professor declared her to be a “muckraker.” She began her career in 2007 and began writing for The Times in 2017.For moreDeSantis is trying to channel the same culture war issues as Donald Trump, but with more discipline, The New Yorker explained in a profile.Florida teachers, worried about violating new state laws, are increasingly nervous about what they can say to their students in schools.DeSantis’s Democratic opponent for governor, Representative Charlie Crist, picked a teachers union leader as his running mate.DeSantis suspended four school board members after a Parkland school shooting report accused them of incompetence. One ousted member called the move “political retribution.”NEWSPoliticsThe redacted F.B.I. affidavit seeking court permission to search Donald Trump’s home.Jon Elswick/Associated PressProsecutors may be pursuing a theory that Donald Trump illegally obstructed Justice Department efforts to retrieve classified documents from him.Intelligence officials will review Trump’s handling of the documents for possible national security risks.President Biden’s student loan plan is the latest example of political limitations forcing Democrats to settle on patchwork solutions to solve economic problems.InternationalUkrainian women have taken on new roles in wartime, including demining and combat.Outrage over videos showing Finland’s prime minister dancing at parties led to a debate over whether she is held to a different standard than older, male leaders.Serbia’s president canceled Europride, a weeklong L.G.B.T.Q. celebration. Organizers pledged to go ahead as planned.HealthAnxious and depressed teens are increasingly prescribed multiple powerful psychiatric drugs, many of them untested in adolescents.Some public health officials expressed concern that the U.S. would fall short on distributing updated Covid vaccines in the coming weeks.Abbott Nutrition said it will resume production of its leading baby formula, months after its plant shutdown triggered a national shortage.FROM OPINIONOn women’s rights, Democrats are in an asymmetrical war. They should act like it, Maureen Dowd argues.Summer sequels are worse than ever — in politics and in movies, Pamela Paul writes.You don’t need an electric car to be as powerful as you might think, Edward Niedermeyer argues.Are you fun? Take Frank Augugliaro’s and Jessica Bennett’s quiz.Talk of secession — or even another American civil war — is escapist fantasy. We’re stuck with each other, says Sarah Vowell.The Sunday question: The way Americans pay for college is broken. What would fix it?President Biden’s plan to cancel student debt is a good start, says Suzanne Kahn, but more government funding for colleges would reduce students’ reliance on loans. Laura Arnold wants more visibility into school quality so students can know whether a loan is worth it.MORNING READSThe Giant Slide in Detroit.“The waxing was a little robust”: A giant slide sent a few too many riders airborne.The office’s last stand: It’s either the end of the flexibility era — or the beginning of rebellion.Chill out: San Franciscans are done apologizing for their cold summers.Sunday routine: An attendant keeps the clock for tennis players at a New York park.Advice from Wirecutter: Bug zappers kill the wrong bugs.A Times classic: How often should you really wash your hair?BOOKSGetting published: The industry is intimidating. How does a writer break in?By the Book: James Hannaham resists the very idea of genres.Times best sellers: “Diana, William, and Harry,” a biography by James Patterson and Chris Mooney, is a hardcover nonfiction best seller. See all our lists here.THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEArielle Bobb-Willis for The New York TimesOn the cover: Has Coco Gauff’s moment arrived?All the tips: How to do everything.The Ethicist: Is it OK that my friend keeps her anti-abortion views quiet?Eat: The seasonal gems of Japanese fruit sandwiches.Screenland: The app Be-Real captures our nostalgia for a simpler online era.Read the full issue.THE WEEK AHEADWhat to Watch ForNASA will launch a giant rocket on Monday in a first unmanned test of a spacecraft that aims to take astronauts to the moon for the first time in nearly a half-century.The C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky, is expected to decide whether to offer doses of an updated Covid booster after an advisory panel meets Thursday and Friday.The Labor Department will release employment data for August on Friday.The MTV Video Music Awards are tonight. LL Cool J, Nicki Minaj and Jack Harlow are the hosts.Tennis’s U.S. Open will start Monday. The men’s star Novak Djokovic will miss the tournament because he is unvaccinated and was not allowed into New York.What to Cook This WeekDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Hadas Smirnoff.Freed from picky eaters for a week (read: kids at camp), Margaux Laskey rounded up spicy, vegetable-abundant weeknight options, including spicy and saucy cherry tomato pasta, saag paneer and skillet chicken thighs with brown butter corn.NOW TIME TO PLAYHere’s a clue from the Sunday crossword:98 Across: Bridge that’s painted International OrangeTake the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.Here’s today’s Spelling Bee. Here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.Matthew Cullen, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      As DeSantis Campaigns on Education, Crist Picks Teacher as Running Mate

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      Karla Hernández-Mats, head of the largest teachers union in the region, criticized the Republican governor for attacking educators. “This is what dictators do,” she said.MIAMI — In choosing the head of the largest teachers union in the Southeast as his running mate, Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, said he found a partner to embody the caring and empathy that he argues Gov. Ron DeSantis sorely lacks.Mr. Crist named Karla Hernández-Mats, the president of the United Teachers of Dade, as his lieutenant governor pick on Saturday, casting the former middle school special education science teacher — who is unknown to the vast majority of Florida voters — as a passionate parent and advocate ready to govern at his side, despite her lack of experience in elective office.Ms. Hernández-Mats has “a good heart,” Mr. Crist said in a brief interview, the first after making his decision. “That moves me more than anything, always.”The daughter of Honduran immigrants, Ms. Hernández-Mats taught for a decade in Hialeah, a working class, heavily Cuban American and heavily Republican city northwest of Miami. In 2010, she was named Florida’s teacher of the year. Her mother was a secretary, she said, and her father a farmworker who cut sugar cane and picked tomatoes until he landed a union job as a carpenter.“It epitomizes the American dream,” Ms. Hernández-Mats said of her life in a separate interview, her first since becoming Mr. Crist’s running mate.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsThe Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s increasingly hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a special election in New York’s Hudson Valley is the latest example.New Women Voters: The number of women signing up to vote surged in some states after Roe was overturned, particularly in states where abortion rights are at risk.Sensing a Shift: Abortion rights, falling gas prices, legislative victories and Donald J. Trump’s re-emergence have Democrats dreaming again that they just might keep control of Congress. But the House map still favors Republicans.Bruising Fights in N.Y.: A string of ugly primaries played out across the state, as Democrats and Republicans fought over rival personalities and the ideological direction of their parties.Mr. Crist said he would continue to emphasize how unaffordable the state has become under Mr. DeSantis and how the governor has restricted people’s rights, including by opposing abortion, which is now illegal in Florida after 15 weeks of pregnancy.But in selecting a teachers union leader, Mr. Crist has ensured, for better or worse, that the governor’s race will remain focused at least in part on matters of education, a topic that Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has seized as an electoral strength in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. DeSantis, who gained a national following for bucking public health experts and reopening Florida businesses and schools sooner than other states, has made “parents’ rights” a centerpiece of his message. He has waged cultural battles against the teaching of gender identity and racism in schools. And he campaigned for 30 school board candidates, almost all of whom won or made it into runoffs in Tuesday’s primary election. Two of the winners were in Miami-Dade County.The Republican Party of Florida wasted no time in criticizing Mr. Crist’s pick, saying before the campaign officially named Ms. Hernández-Mats that she represented “another slap in the face to Florida’s parents.”“It confirms how out of touch Crist is with Florida families,” the party said in a statement on Friday.Mr. Crist dismissed the notion that voters would agree with the criticism that sharing the ticket with a teachers union chief would somehow put him in opposition to parents.“I believe that parents being involved is incredibly important, and teachers should also be respected for their expertise,” he said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”Democrats argued that Ms. Hernández-Mats could relate to voters as a working mother who understands the challenges inside classrooms. And, as a Spanish speaker, she can reach Hispanic voters whom the party has struggled to win.“Hispanic voters are obviously immensely critical to building a winning coalition for Democrats,” said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic political consultant in Miami who is Nicaraguan American. “The best way to go toe-to-toe is if you have someone in the community to fight back.”In the interview, the energetic Ms. Hernández-Mats seemed eager to fulfill a running mate’s frequent role in attacking the opposing candidate.“The state is stripping away freedoms,” she said. “Governor DeSantis doesn’t want women to choose or have autonomy over their bodies or health care. They take away one freedom and then they take away more freedom.”“Just a few months ago, people were like, ‘Teachers are amazing!’” she added, recalling how teachers were praised for teaching online early in the pandemic. “And now we have a governor that attacks teachers and public education. To what end? 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      Federal judge orders release of redacted Trump search affidavit

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      Federal judge orders release of redacted Trump search affidavit Affidavit is expected to contain information about investigation into Trump’s retention of government secrets at Mar-a-Lago A federal judge ordered on Thursday that the affidavit justifying the search warrant used to seize sensitive government documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month should be partly unsealed according to redactions proposed by the justice department.The order from Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the FBI search warrant and is overseeing the case, instructed the justice department to release a redacted version of the affidavit that he had reviewed before noon on Friday.Trump is reading my memoir, Kushner claims of famously book-shy bossRead moreIn a two-page ruling, the judge said the justice department’s proposed redactions were specifically restricted to keep secret grand jury material, the identities of uncharged individuals and sources and methods used in the criminal investigation – and the remainder could become public.“The government has met its burden of showing that its proposed redactions are narrowly tailored to serve the government’s legitimate interest in the integrity of the ongoing investigation and are the least onerous alternative to sealing the entire Affidavit,” Reinhart wrote.The affidavit is expected to contain key information – notably the probable cause -about the justice department’s investigation into Trump’s unauthorized retention of government secrets at Mar-a-Lago, which could arise to potential charges including under the Espionage Act or obstruction of justice.How much of the affidavit will be redacted was not clear. The justice department had opposed unsealing the affidavit in any way, and only submitted proposed redactions after being ordered to do so by Reinhart last week, warning redactions could be so extensive as to make it meaningless.But depending on how the affidavit was produced, former US attorneys said, it could also contain elements that are not directly related to the investigation, such as descriptions of potential crimes that the justice department suspected were being committed at Mar-a-Lago.The submission – and partial release of the affidavit – is a major juncture in the developing investigation, being led by the justice department’s national security division, and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, who personally approved the warrant after days of deliberations.The FBI earlier this month quietly executed a search warrant at Trump’s beachfront, pay-for-membership resort in Palm Beach, Florida, retrieving 26 boxes of highly sensitive government records, including some documents with “top secret” markings.Trump has attempted to hit back at the justice department in subsequent days, and on Monday filed a motion seeking the appointment of a so-called special master to determine what documents federal investigators can use as evidence, and to get a more detailed list of what was seized.The ruling from Reinhart, which came just hours after the justice department submitted its proposed redactions – also under seal – was expected to some degree after he said last week in court in West Palm Beach, Florida, that he was inclined to make some of the affidavit public.“I’m not prepared to find that the affidavit should be fully sealed,” Reinhart said, explaining that he thought it was important that the public have as much information as it could, while acknowledging the redactions sought by the justice department would likely be extensive.The preview of his decision on Thursday followed a disclosure from the chief of the counter-intelligence section at the justice department, Jay Bratt, that the criminal investigation surrounding the FBI’s seizure of government documents from Mar-a-Lago remained in “early stages”.Bratt had argued in court against the release of any portion of the affidavit or even a redacted version of the highly-sensitive document, saying it could risk revealing the roadmap of the investigation and chill cooperation from other witnesses who may come forward.The judge, however, disagreed that the justice department could make nothing of the affidavit public, and ordered Bratt to file one with redactions to protect the probe in case he decided to make it public. He assured the government: “This is going to be a considered, careful process.”Reinhart presided over arguments between the justice department and several media organizations. Trump has said he supports unsealing the affidavit but filed no motion of his own. One of his lawyers, Chrsitina Bobb, nonetheless attended the hearing last week to observe proceedings.The justice department that day did support unsealing several ancillary documents that were not directly related to the affidavit, including the cover sheet to the search warrant application, and the court’s sealing order – which Reinhart agreed to make public.Those unsealed documents offered more detail about the case. Notably, the cover sheet showed the department’s descriptions of potential crimes at Mar-a-Lago: wilful retention of national defense information, concealment or removal of government records, and obstruction of a federal investigation.TopicsDonald TrumpFloridaMar-a-LagoUS politicsnewsReuse this content More