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      In Appalachia, a Father Got Black Lung. Then His Son Did, Too.

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      Denver Brock and his son Aundra used to spend early mornings hunting rabbits in the wooded highlands of Harlan County, Ky. But they don’t get out there much these days. They both get too breathless trying to follow the baying hounds.Instead, they tend a large garden alongside Denver Brock’s home. Even that can prove difficult, requiring them to work slowly and take frequent breaks.“You get so dizzy,” Denver Brock said, “you can’t hardly stand up.”The Brocks followed a long family tradition when they became Appalachian coal miners. For it, they both now have coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, a debilitating disease characterized by masses and scarred tissue in the chest, and better known by its colloquial name: black lung.Mr. Brock, 73, wasn’t all that surprised when he was diagnosed in his mid-60s. In coal mining communities, black lung has long been considered an “old man’s disease,” one to be almost expected after enough years underground.But his son was diagnosed much younger, at just 41. Like his father, he has progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of the disease. And today, at 48, he’s even sicker.When he followed his father into mining, he thought he was entering a safer industry than the one prior generations had worked in. By the 1990s, safety standards and miner protections had nearly consigned the disease to history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Supreme Court Case on Trans Care Ruled Against My Daughter

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      There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. No mother imagines that her everyday fight to do right by her child would land her there.My daughter, L.W., came out as transgender late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she is thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter’s care in 2023, we fought back by suing the state. Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessee’s ban on such care.I am beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The compelling, expert legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were not enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She’s angry, scared and hurt that the American system of democracy that we so put on a pedestal didn’t work to protect her.My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband’s demands in our lawsuit against the ban felt quite basic: Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don’t let our child’s very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough.Raising a transgender kid in Tennessee, we know that not everyone understands people like her or her health care — and that’s OK. We don’t need to agree on everything. But we do need our fundamental rights respected.I have devoted myself to finding our daughter consistent care in one state after another. The nightmare of our disrupted life pales in comparison to the nightmare of losing access to the health care that has allowed our daughter to thrive. After Tennessee passed its ban, we traveled to another provider in a different state. After that state passed a ban, we moved on to another one. We are now on our fourth state. The five-hour drive each way, taking time off work and school, is hard, but thankfully, we found a clinic and pharmacy that take our insurance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Trump Debates Iran Action, the Meaning of ‘America First’ Is on the Line

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      As President Trump ponders involving the United States in Israel’s attacks on Iran, the G.O.P. faces a thorny question: What does “America first” really mean?A decade ago, President Trump electrified conservatives with his promises to get the United States out of foreign entanglements and to always put — say it with me — “America first.”As he weighs involving American planes and weaponry in Israel’s attacks on Iran, a brawl has broken out in the Republican Party over what “America first” really means.I wrote today about how a swath of Trump’s base is in an uproar over the president’s increasing openness to deploying U.S. warplanes — and perhaps even 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs — against Iran in an effort to help Israel finish off its nuclear program.“Everyone is finding out who are real America First/MAGA and who were fake and just said it bc it was popular,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted on X over the weekend. She added, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”The anger extends well beyond Greene’s social-media account, to cable television and the podcast feeds of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Candace Owens. They are passionately arguing that intervening in Iran would contravene Trump’s long-held promise to steer the nation out of, not into, foreign entanglements, and threaten to fracture his whole coalition.It’s a remarkable fight, and one that raises a bigger question about who is really the keeper of Trump’s political flame. Is it the non-interventionists who have been there from the start, or the Republican hawks — the Senator Lindsey Grahams of the world — who are now sticking by the president?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. to Cut Gun-Sale Inspectors by Two-Thirds as It Moves to Downsize A.T.F.

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      The move is part of the Trump administration’s effort to defang and downsize the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.The Justice Department plans to slash the number of inspectors who monitor federally licensed gun dealers by two-thirds, sharply limiting the government’s already crimped capacity to identify businesses that sell guns to criminals, according to budget documents.The move, part of the Trump administration’s effort to defang and downsize the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, comes as the department considers merging the A.T.F. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. It follows a rollback of Biden-era regulations aimed at stemming the spread of deadly homemade firearms, along with other gun control measures.The department plans to eliminate 541 of the estimated 800 investigators responsible for determining whether federal dealers are following federal law and regulations intended to keep guns away from traffickers, straw purchasers, criminals and those found to have severe mental illness, according to a budget summary quietly circulated last week.Department officials estimated the reductions would reduce “A.T.F.’s capacity to regulate the firearms and explosives industries by approximately 40 percent” in the fiscal year starting in November — even though the staff cuts represent two-thirds of the inspection work force. The cuts are needed to meet the White House demand that A.T.F. cut nearly a third from its budget of $1.6 billion.News of the plan came as a shock to a work force already reeling from months of disruption. Several frontline agency staff members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said the cuts would lead to hundreds of layoffs and effectively end the A.T.F.’s role as a serious regulator of gun sales, if they are not reversed by the White House or Congress.“These are devastating cuts to law enforcement funding and would undermine A.T.F.’s ability to keep communities safe from gun violence,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by the former mayor of New York Michael R. Bloomberg. “This budget would be a win for unscrupulous gun dealers and a terrible setback for A.T.F.’s state and local law enforcement partners.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Katie Miller’s Washington Rise Takes a Musk Detour

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      She is one half of a Trump-world power couple. But she’s on Team Elon. It’s gotten complicated.It was the three-word gavel-bang heard across Washington — the conversation-ender meant to cow colleagues and cabinet secretaries, deployed daily by a slight woman with a big job:“Elon wants this.”For months, Katie Miller, the all-purpose operative for the world’s richest man, had been entrusted to help execute Elon Musk’s merry rampage through the federal government, conveying his priorities, his vision, his likes and dislikes with the tacit force of an executive order.When she spoke, Ms. Miller implied to Trump acolytes high and low, they should proceed as if it were Mr. Musk’s mouth moving.Where he walked, Ms. Miller invariably followed, sometimes trailing him straight into Oval Office meetings — and occasionally finding herself gently redirected back out of the room by White House staff, an administration official recalled.Mr. Musk even held court regularly off the clock at the home Ms. Miller shares with Stephen Miller, President Trump’s most powerful policy aide, and their three young children, according to people familiar with the matter.Now, Mr. Musk is gone — or out of Washington, anyway — in a spectacular, market-moving, mutually vicious fireball of a breakup with Mr. Trump.And life in the home of Katie and Stephen Miller has gotten complicated.Mr. Miller is the millennial avatar of all that MAGA loves and liberals loathe about the Trump agenda. His loyalty to the president is unquestioned. Ms. Miller, a 33-year-old veteran of the first Trump administration, is a top lieutenant for Mr. Trump’s friend-turned-enemy-turned-who-knows-what-now. How and whether the present arrangement can be sustained is uncertain — and widely buzzed about in Washington, especially among the many Trump allies who do not entirely miss her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In a Year of Working Dangerously, Fear of Trump Marks Public Service Awards

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      The Trump administration’s large cuts to the federal work force turned an annual celebration of federal workers into a reminder of loss.Every year in Washington, hundreds of federal workers put on gowns and tuxedos to honor colleagues who battle disease, pursue criminals and invent new technology, in what is billed as the Oscars of public service. Tearful honorees call co-workers and families onstage, and cabinet secretaries and the president offer thanks in person or by video.Things looked different this year.These are difficult times to be a nonpartisan federal expert, as the Trump administration has cast civil servants as villains and forced out a quarter-million of them. For the first time in the two-decade history of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, the federal employee of the year — the biggest honor — was no longer a federal employee.David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department official, was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system.In accepting his award on Tuesday night, Mr. Lebryk noted that “most of my career was spent trying to be unnoticed.” But he referred to the circumstances that led to his resignation, and offered a credo for public service.“It is important to exercise principled leadership, make difficult decisions, have the courage and conviction to stand behind those decisions and be accountable and ultimately prepared to accept the consequences of those decisions,” he said.There were no other acceptance speeches for awards given at the event — a departure from previous years — because some honorees said they were fearful of even inadvertently irking the administration. At least one winner turned down the award because the worker’s boss, a Trump appointee, forbade the worker to accept it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump to Again Extend TikTok’s Reprieve From U.S. Ban

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      The president plans to sign another executive order this week that would give the popular video app more time to change its ownership structure.President Trump intends to again extend the deadline for when TikTok must be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States, its third reprieve this year.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump would sign an executive order this week giving TikTok 90 more days — to mid-September — to find a new owner to comply with a federal law that requires the company to change its ownership structure to resolve national security concerns. TikTok’s current deadline is Thursday.“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement.Mr. Trump has repeatedly declined to enforce the law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January after Congress passed it with wide bipartisan support last year. The app’s future is part of the discussion in his administration’s ongoing trade talks with China.Mr. Trump, who issued similar delays in January and in April, has given TikTok an unexpected lifeline after its future in the United States appeared to be doomed. The president tried to ban TikTok in his first term but flipped his stance on the app last year — a shift that is credited in part to one of his donors, who has a sizable stake in ByteDance, as well as his own growing popularity on the app.The repeated extensions have raised concerns among a handful of lawmakers, who have urged Mr. Trump to clarify his plans for TikTok or force it to stop operating in the United States. They and others in Washington worry that TikTok could hand over sensitive U.S. user data to Beijing, like location information, or that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to sway opinions and spread misinformation in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Proposal Ends Tax Cuts for Clean Energy, Disappointing Climate Advocates

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      A Senate tax package softens some blows imposed on renewables by a House version of the bill. But it still terminates many credits for clean power.Climate advocates, Democrats, and even some House Republicans who last month had supported a tax package that gutted federal support for clean energy were hoping the Senate would make fixes to protect energy manufacturing and jobs.But on Monday, Senate Republicans disappointed them, proposing to quickly end most tax breaks for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other clean energy.Draft legislation released by the Senate Finance Committee would terminate or scale back most of the major tax incentives for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.The plan would eliminate within six months a $7,500 consumer tax credit for purchases of electric vehicles as well as home energy rebates for things like electric heat pumps and induction stoves. A tax credit for homeowners who install solar panels on rooftops would end within 180 days. A subsidy for making hydrogen fuels would expire this year.Federal tax credits for wind and solar power, which have been in place for decades but were made more lucrative under the Inflation Reduction Act, would be rapidly phased out. Wind and solar companies could qualify for the full tax break only if they began construction in the next six months. They would receive 60 percent of the tax break if they began construction in 2026, and 20 percent of the tax credit if they began construction in 2027. Projects built after that would get nothing.That’s a slightly longer runway for renewable energy than is in the House version of the bill, which would have ended those tax breaks almost immediately.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More