Friday, September 25, 2026 · Morning Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. As juvenile crime falls and youth prisons close across the country, Tennessee is building more of them. The rest of the country is emptying these institutions; one statehouse is choosing to cage more children even as the pretext for doing so shrinks.

In Pennsylvania's Amish country, measles is spreading and doctors at a rural clinic near the outbreak's center describe patients arriving gravely ill while federal officials dispute the death toll. The physicians on the ground scramble to keep up; the government above them argues over how many have already died.

The same logic — stripping the vulnerable of standing — runs through the machinery of the state. India is purging its electoral rolls of what officials call dead, duplicate and ineligible voters, with the real fear that eligible voters get swept out too and their exclusion decides who wins. In Washington the administration has rushed to the Supreme Court after a ruling halted deportations of people to countries not their own, desperate to keep a core weapon against migrants intact.

The war grinds down the occupied. Residents of Oleshky, under Russian control, send messages describing careful rationing of dwindling food, a chronic shortage of medication and constant attacks. Meanwhile Danish intelligence warns Russia could attack a NATO country within months — a threat governments everywhere use to justify more spending on arms while the people already under Russian guns go hungry and untreated.