Sunday, September 27, 2026 · Evening Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. The federal Office of Civil Rights has been hollowed out by staff cuts, closed offices and restructuring, leaving parents of children with disabilities waiting longer at what is often their last stop against discrimination. Stripped down, the office no longer serves that role — a quiet withdrawal of protection from the children least able to absorb the loss.

In German seaports, workers have rejected a wage offer for the fourth time, refusing the deal put to them by the Verdi trade union working in conjunction with the Central Association of German Seaport Operators. Four rejections is not indecision; it is dockworkers reading exactly whose interests union leadership and the employers' association are jointly defending.

At home, the White House is expanding a taxpayer-paid advertising campaign that boosts Trump and borrows his own political rhetoric, defended as "public service" announcements even as the spots go national and draw scrutiny. The courtiers keep arriving: Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei dined privately with Trump, whose cautions the president has dismissed, days after Xi Jinping left a White House summit.

The money agrees with the spectacle: foreign investors made record net purchases of US equities and investment fund shares, $426 billion in the second quarter, capital betting on an administration built to serve it. Meanwhile a powerful nor'easter battered the Northeast again on Sunday, flooding coastal communities and leaving tens of thousands without power as forecasters warned another round of high tides could inundate vulnerable shorelines — the bill falling, as ever, on working people, not on the capital celebrating its record quarter.