TODAY’S MILITARY story

Trump: US cities should be military ‘training grounds’

What happened
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday addressed hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals hastily summoned from around the world to a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Hegseth said he planned to toughen physical fitness and grooming standards and root out “fat generals” and “woke” ideologies that he claimed hamstrung the military’s lethality. Trump said he wanted the military to fight the “enemy within” the U.S.

Who said what
Defense officials spent much of yesterday “trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering,” Politico said, with one saying it “could have been an email.” The top U.S. military brass “sat mostly in silence” as Trump “talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day” — Joe Biden, the media, not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, The New York Times said. But there was “something new” in minute 44 of his speech, when Trump told the generals that for some of them, a “major part” of their job would be tackling the “war from within” in “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.”

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump recounted telling his defense secretary. Hegseth told the military leaders that “you kill people and break things for a living” and will no longer have to “fight with stupid rules of engagement.”

What next?
Trump’s “emphasis on deploying the military for domestic law enforcement” was “distressing,” The Washington Post said in an editorial, and Hegseth’s fixation on making the military “more lethal” was “not a feature people typically look for in forces deployed in their communities.”

TODAY’S Free SPeech Story

Judge rules Trump illegally targeted Gaza protesters

What happened
A federal judge in Boston yesterday ruled that the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport international students for voicing their support for Palestinians was an illegal, “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.” The case was brought by a group of university faculty in response to the administration’s targeting of noncitizen students, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, who had publicly opposed Israel’s war in Gaza.

Who said what
U.S. District Judge William Young, appointed four decades ago by Ronald Reagan, said the case was “perhaps the most important ever to fall” before his court. His “blistering ruling” followed a July trial in which top Trump administration officials “described orchestrating the arrests of these activists and taking cues from an anonymously run website,” Politico said.

Young “directly and sharply” criticized President Donald Trump in his “scathing” opinion, The Associated Press said. “Noncitizens lawfully present” in the U.S. “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” he said. And Trump’s “palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.” A White House spokesperson said Young’s “outrageous” ruling “hampers the safety and security of our nation.”

What next?
Young “said he would hold a hearing at a later date on which remedies to impose for the free-speech violations,” The Wall Street Journal said, though he “suggested his options might be limited.”

It’s not all bad

Endangered mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park are getting a fighting chance, thanks to tourism dollars and reformed former poachers. Because local communities get some of the $800 in park entrance fees paid by foreign visitors, poaching has become “increasingly rare” in Bwindi, said The Associated Press. Some former poachers have even become conservationists, forming surveillance groups that help armed rangers on patrol.

Under the radar

‘Nightmare bacteria’ are rapidly spreading

“Nightmare bacteria” are very much the stuff of waking life. These microbes pose a “triple threat” to humanity because they are “resistant to all or nearly all antibiotics,” have “high mortality rates” and can “spread their resistance to other bacteria,” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Tom Frieden said in 2013. Nightmare bacteria infections have increased significantly in the past few years and are likely to cause more deaths over time.

Infections from nightmare bacteria rose by almost 70% in the U.S. between 2019 and 2023, according to a report published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine by CDC scientists. The report specifically refers to the rise of infections from a certain group of bacteria called Enterobacterales. These bacteria are resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, including carbapenems, which are used to treat “severe multidrug-resistant bacterial infections,” said Scientific American.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem worldwide. Bacteria with an antibiotic-destroying “NDM” gene were “once considered exotic, linked to a small number of patients who received medical care overseas,” said The Associated Press. Covid-19 is among several factors that could have contributed to the rise in cases. “We know that there was a huge surge in antibiotic use during the pandemic, so this likely is reflected in increasing drug resistance,” Jason Burnham, a researcher at Washington University, told the AP. Doctors say it is important to take antibiotics exactly as prescribed to avoid promoting resistance.

On this day

October 1, 2024

Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated as the 66th president of Mexico, becoming the first woman and first Jewish person to hold the office. Sheinbaum enacted a series of reforms upon taking office and currently holds a 79% approval rating, according to Mexico’s Enkoll poll.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘Low but stable’

“Trump, Hegseth address military leaders,” The Washington Post says on Wednesday’s front page. “Top military leaders hear lecture on race, gender,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says. “President tells military brass to fight ‘enemy within’ U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal says. “Leaders condemn military plan” for Chicago, the Chicago Tribune says. “Trump’s poll rating is low but stable after a summer of turmoil,” The New York Times says. “Judge gives foreign students a victory,” The Boston Globe says. “U.S. may resume processing new DACA requests,” says the Los Angeles Times.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Raising a stink

A South Carolina teaching assistant was arrested and charged with malicious injury to personal property and interfering with schools after he allegedly spritzed “poop spray” around campus. Investigators accused Alexander Lewis of using a spray “designed to mimic the smell of feces” multiple times over the last month, causing health issues among West Florence High School students and staff, said Local 12. The “mysterious” stench also led to nearly $55,000 worth of inspection and repair costs.

Morning Report was written and edited by Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Rafi Schwartz, Peter Weber and Kari Wilkin, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.