Everyone has variation in their bowel movements from time to time. But when your digestion slows to fewer than three bowel movements per week and your stool is hard, dry, and difficult to pass, that’s constipation.

The good news is you can often get things moving again with some simple changes to your diet. Start by incorporating more of the best foods for constipation into your usual meals and snacks. Here are some of the most effective options.

Peas, Brussels sprouts, and other vegetables

Getting enough fiber is one of the most important steps you can take to relieve constipation through your diet. Both dietary fiber and fiber supplements have been shown to help. Adults need 25 to 34 grams of fiber per day, but most Americans don’t reach that goal.

Eating more vegetables is a straightforward way to increase your fiber intake, says Dr. Trisha Pasricha, a physician-scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and author of the new book You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. But certain picks pack more fiber than others. She recommends peas, which have 9.4 grams of fiber per cup, and Brussels sprouts, which have 6 grams per cup. 

“High-fiber foods help with constipation by increasing the weight and water content of the stool,” adds Dr. Nicé Bertha Toriz, a gastroenterologist at MNGI Digestive Health and spokesperson for the American Gastroenterological Association. “The added weight helps the stool move faster through the colon, and the extra water makes the stool softer and easier to pass.” She recommends artichoke hearts, with nearly 5 grams of fiber per half-cup.

Beans and lentils

Beans and lentils are popular sources of plant-based protein, but they also pack plenty of fiber.

Pasricha suggests roasted chickpeas as a fiber-rich swap for a salty snack like pretzels or chips. “They’re crunchy, they can be a little salty, so they satisfy that craving, but they’re packed with fiber and overall a much healthier choice,” she says. A one-ounce serving has 5 grams of fiber.

Other good options include black beans, with 15 grams per cup; pinto beans, with 15.5 grams per cup; and lentils, with 13.5 grams per cup. Toriz also recommends edamame, which have 8 grams per cup.

Kiwis

Two small randomized controlled trials—funded by a company that sells kiwis— found that eating two kiwis a day can help people who are constipated have more bowel movements, comparable to the effects of taking a fiber supplement. “One [study] was for gold kiwis, and the other was for green kiwis, so eat whichever one you want,” Pasricha says. “And you don’t have to eat the peels, although you can.”

Two kiwis have 4.5 grams of fiber, but it might not only be the fiber that helps, she says. “We haven't quite nailed down: Is it some other nutrient in there that's acting on the gut or microbiome to help speed things up?” she says.

Toriz also recommends raspberries, with 9.75 grams of fiber per cup, and dried figs, with 15.7 grams per cup.

Dried plums

Yes, this is a more palatable way of saying prunes—but prunes and prune juice get a bad reputation as your grandmother’s favorite constipation remedy. “They are just incredibly effective and have been well-studied,” Pasricha says. Generally, studies have found eating five prunes in the morning and five prunes in the evening can improve chronic constipation and increase stool frequency and consistency. You can work up to that by starting with just five a day and seeing how you feel.

Together, those 10 daily prunes only add up to fewer than 6 grams of fiber each day. Like with kiwis, some experts hypothesize that something beyond just fiber helps prunes act on constipation. 

Keep in mind that prunes tend to cause some bloating, Pasricha cautions. “Kiwis don't cause [as much] bloating, but they relieve constipation just as well,” she says, according to another kiwi-company-funded study.

No matter which fiber-rich foods you prefer to add to your diet for constipation relief, ramp up slowly. Otherwise, you might feel bloated, gassy, or crampy. “Try to increase your fiber by about 5 grams every week until you reach 25 to 35 grams of fiber per day,” Toriz suggests.

Hot beverages

Plenty of people are familiar with the experience of having to poop right after drinking coffee. “Coffee can stimulate colon motility, which in turn helps with constipation,” Toriz says. But decaf coffee and plain warm water can also stimulate contractions in the colon that help you have a bowel movement to a lesser degree, Pasricha says. 

This may not help if you’re already severely constipated. “You may need to do coffee plus something else to help soften that stool,” Pasricha says.

When to talk to a doctor about constipation

When go-to home remedies for constipation don’t help enough, your doctor might recommend a laxative, Toriz says. There are several types that all work slightly differently to relieve constipation, so it’s worth discussing your options with a health care provider.

And don’t delay if you’re concerned. “I think people have this idea that you have to wait for it to become a crisis before you talk to a doctor,” and that simply isn’t true, Pasricha says.

A doctor might also recommend better sleep hygiene, stress reduction, pelvic floor physical therapy, or prescription medications. “There are actually different types of constipation, and a gastroenterologist can help determine the underlying cause,” as well as the most appropriate course of treatment, Toriz says.

Your doctor will also ask you about potential red flags that something more serious may be going on, such as red or black stool or unintentional weight loss. These symptoms alongside constipation may warrant a colonoscopy, Toriz says.

There’s a point every summer when just about any of us could use a dose of ridiculousness. It might hit right as the kids return from camp—or as you’re counting the days until they go. Hottest day of the year? A dumb, breezy comedy is just the thing. Bad day at work? Maybe Jon Hamm in a bathrobe is calling your name.

In the absurd-comedy department you could do much worse than Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, in which Zoey Deutch plays the Gail of the title, a bright-eyed, button-nosed small-town Kansas hairdresser engaged to her bland but seemingly devoted high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy). With the wedding just a few weeks away, Gail offhandedly introduces Tom to the concept of the celebrity pass, in which each person in a committed partnership is allowed to have sex with one famous person of his or her choice, identified in advance. Tom isn’t sure he’s got a celebrity crush—Tilda Swinton is floated as a possibility—but it turns out he finds a candidate pretty fast. (To reveal who it is would spoil one of the movie’s many silly pleasures.)

Crestfallen, Gail heads to Los Angeles with her bestie coworker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) for a hairdressers’ conference. But her real aim is to solve her romantic befuddlement by sleeping with her celebrity crush, who happens to be Jon Hamm. How to find him? The guy selling star maps on Hollywood Boulevard knows how to locate the homes of Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon—forget that both died years ago— but has no idea where Hamm might reside. He does give them a suggestion, though, that leads them to an ambitious aspiring agent at Creative Artists Agency, Ben Wang’s Caleb. Caleb has no idea how to find Hamm either, though he does lead them to someone who might prove useful, Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery, who now whiles away his days of underemployment in his garage, working out his aggressions by punching a forlorn-looking mannequin. The gang is rounded out by world-weary paparazzo Vincent (Ken Marino), who has never been able to snap a picture of Hamm—he considers the actor his white whale.

Any resemblance to The Wizard of Oz, including Gail’s wardrobe of snazzy red shoes, is purely un-coincidental. Gail Daughtry was directed and cowritten by David Wain, a veteran of the comedy troupe The State and also the director of the 2001 cult hit Wet Hot American Summer; Marino, another State and Wet Hot alumnus, is his cowriter. The gags here are loose-limbed and knock-kneed, and there are lots of them: if one doesn’t quite land, you needn’t worry—another will be coming along soon. Some jokes, including a riff on the history of the Wright Brothers, feel vaguely Dada, as if Marino and Wain had spent a long, happy stretch of aimless days drinking coffee and free-associating. And there’s lots of mild raunchiness here, including an over-the-top sex scene rendered in dreamy-silly soft-focus. (Here’s where Hamm and his bathrobe come in.) The whole enterprise glows with friendly, pleasing daffiness.

Best of all is Deutch’s Gail, whose sunbeam demeanor barely conceals her flirty, mischievous side. Gail believes that once she’s achieved her goal of seducing Hamm, she’ll be ready to settle down with Tom. Fat chance. Deutch was marvelous as Jean Seberg in last year’s Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s sprightly film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless. Here, she shows a knack for goodnatured, slightly off-color silliness. In the film’s early moments, Gail cheerfully explains to Otto why she and her dud boyfriend Tom were made for each other: “I finally got him to buy the cow after giving him the milk for free.” Even in her exaggerated innocence, there’s something delightfully unhinged about her. Any old schmuck can buy a cow. What Gail’s kooky erotic odyssey teaches her is that no one can fence her in.

Scroll through LinkedIn, and you will find a flurry of new job listings with curious titles: “Narrative Engineer”, “UGC Engineer”, “Media Engineer.” At first glance, they sound like entirely new disciplines. Look closer, and they feel suspiciously familiar. 

As someone who has built a decade-long career in the marketing industry, I wondered: Why are these marketing roles being relabeled? I took my question to social media. “Is marketing being rebranded so boys can do it too?” I quipped on TikTok between meetings. 

I checked back a few hours later, and my comments section was aflame with marketers, tech folk, and VCs. Some had sensed something was off but couldn’t quite name it; others shared the most absurd titles they’d come across; and some pushed back, arguing that something genuinely new was emerging.

The tech bro-ification of marketing is underway. It’s not the first time a profession has been repackaged like this. But beneath this trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded, and valued. The question: why is this happening to marketing—and why now?

Part of the answer lies in who marketing has come to be associated with. According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 67% to 70% of marketing practitioners are women, making it one of the few female-dominated fields in the corporate sector. Research consistently shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline, and marketing is no exception. Plenty of professions skew one way or another, but those patterns aren’t driven by biology but rather our cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work. 

The marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific. Shows like Sex and the City and, more recently, Emily in Paris have portrayed marketing as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. Over on social media, this has calcified into the “marketing girlie” trope: the personality hire who makes things pretty in Canva and forces her boss to do TikTok dances. The cliché of a tech bro, by contrast, is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius. These are stereotypes, but they have economic implications. 

The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it have always been intertwined. Before "software engineer" was a job title, coding was a secretarial task, mainly done by women. Cosmopolitan even ran an article in 1967 titled The Computer Girls, touting it as an ideal career for women. Software was "soft" work versus the "hard" work of building physical things. Even Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist at NASA in the 1960s, described feeling like a misplaced “stepchild” among the hardware engineers.

Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously, much to the amusement of her almost exclusively male colleagues. Yet through the 70s and 80s, “software engineering” emerged as a bona fide profession: well-paid, prestigious, and over time, predominantly male. 

There were many different forces responsible for the shifting demographics of the software engineering profession, but it is undeniable that changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research has shown that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they are 100% qualified or, in other words, welcome. 

The same dynamic is now playing out in marketing in reverse. In consumer brands, marketing has always been a core discipline. I would argue Nike’s most valuable asset isn’t the technical spec of a sneaker, but the story around it. However, in Silicon Valley, the hierarchy works differently: those who build sit above those who sell. Except now the very thing they’ve relied on for growth—coding and technical creation—has been commoditized by AI.

The first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste. “Taste is a new core skill,” declared OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” pronounced technologist Paul Graham. 

As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it: AI makes it easier to build new products, so distribution is the biggest challenge facing consumer technology businesses. 

The truth is that taste, distribution, and marketing have always been important. But now that AI is cheapening other kinds of work, tech has been forced to admit that marketing actually matters. 

The problem is, “marketing” comes with baggage. Decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally, so tech is dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing. Brand strategists become narrative engineers. Marketing managers become growth architects. This shouldn't be much of a surprise. Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back to us as revolutionary. Taxis become Ubers, bed and breakfasts become Airbnbs. Marketing is just the Emperor's latest outfit. 

In some cases, these roles are genuinely becoming more technical, but mostly the language is being stretched so thin it's hard to separate reality from corporate fiction. Just like using a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician, using vibe coding and automation tools doesn't make you an engineer. Marketing has always been part science, part art. The irony is, AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and, yes, taste, are still the hardest things to replace. Yet still, employers reach for technical language to signal value. 

Perhaps the upside will be that job titles with a technical veneer could command higher salaries and more respect from leaders who respond better to “engineer” than “marketer.” The problem, though, is the more we conflate value with tech, the more we devalue the art of marketing and the people who practice it.

It might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern. When you control the vocabulary of a field, you decide who deserves a place. Tech has always been good at making familiar ideas feel like breakthroughs, and marketing is just the latest one.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is set to hold its first legislative elections in 20 years on Nov. 28—if the vote proceeds as scheduled.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued the decree on Thursday, calling for the election to be held in all of the Palestinian Territories. The announcement comes as international and domestic pressure has mounted for the PA to reaffirm its legitimacy, especially after the October 2025 U.S.-brokered cease-fire renewed discussions of a future Palestinian state. The cease-fire created a technocratic committee to temporarily govern Gaza but the body has not yet entered the territory.

“The presidential decree calls upon the Palestinian people in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip to participate in free and direct legislative elections to elect members of the Palestinian Legislative Council,” the decree said, according to the official Wafa news agency.

But challenges remain, especially as nearly two million people have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, those in occupied East Jerusalem would need Israeli permission for an election, and ongoing Israeli attacks and movement restrictions could complicate any attempt to hold a vote.

What is the Palestinian Authority?

The PA was established in the 1990s as part of the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PA was intended to provide self-governance in certain Palestinian enclaves across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a five-year period while the two sides negotiated a permanent settlement, including the future status of a Palestinian state.

Due to ongoing Israeli military occupation and settlement expansion, however, the PA has remained as an administrative body with limited sovereignty. The PA has nominal authority over the Palestinian Territories, but in reality it exercises only partial civil control over parts of the West Bank. It has not controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007 when Hamas took control. Hamas defeated Abbas’s dominant Fatah party in the last legislative elections in 2006. Since then, the Palestinian Legislative Council, the parliament of the Palestinian Authority, has largely been defunct, and was formally dissolved in 2018.

Calls for an election

The international community has called for governance reforms within the PA, especially in view of paving the way for Palestinian statehood. The E.U., which provides significant financial support to the PA, has consistently called for institutional reforms and supported Palestinian elections. Last June, Abbas also sent French President Emmanuel Macron a letter committing to holding elections under international supervision, which Macron said demonstrated a willingness to advance a two-state solution. In response to Abbas’s commitments, France recognized the State of Palestine in September. Several other Western countries, including the U.K., Canada, and Australia, also recognized a Palestinian state in September.

Abbas was elected to a four-year term in 2005 but has ruled by decree since. Critics have accused him of authoritarianism and failing to hold long-due elections. Last month, Abbas said presidential elections would be held in early 2027, although he did not say whether he would seek another term.

Elections have also been seen as an important step in establishing post-war Palestinian governance and advancing the stalled cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. Since the October cease-fire, the U.S., the European Union, and Arab states have argued that a “reformed Palestinian Authority” should eventually govern both the West Bank and Gaza.

Earlier this month, Hamas announced that it would dissolve its government and hand over its authority to a technocratic governing committee in an effort to move the cease-fire deal forward. The second phase of the cease-fire began in January, but parts of its terms have not been implemented, such as a complete withdrawal of Israel’s troops, Hamas’s disarmament, and the deployment of the technocratic committee and an International Stabilization Force. Both Hamas and Israel have also accused each other of violating the agreement.

Election challenges

Holding elections across the Palestinian Territories would not be without significant challenges. Nearly two million Palestinians—around 90% of Gaza’s pre-war population—have been displaced since Israel’s war with Hamas began in October 2023, with many being displaced multiple times due to Israeli evacuation orders, according to the United Nations. More than 90% of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, according to an estimate by Al Jazeera, making it difficult to find the infrastructure to hold a vote.

The war also disrupted officials’ ability to maintain Gaza’s population registry, which would complicate efforts to compile voter rolls.

Gaza also held its first elections in 20 years in April. But because of the devastation from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the elections were limited to one municipality, leaving only around five percent of the population—70,000 voters—eligible to cast their ballots. Ultimately, just under 16,000 people voted in the municipality of Deir al-Balah. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank voted in the municipal elections, the first vote held there since October 2023.

Moreover, Israeli attacks on Gaza have continued despite the cease-fire. As of late June, more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli attacks since the cease-fire took effect on Oct. 10, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Increased violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank may also make it difficult to safely hold elections. The U.N. reported more than 1,000 settler attacks—about six a day—as of June. More than 2,200 Palestinians have been displaced this year as a result of settler violence and access restrictions, according to the U.N.

In East Jerusalem, which Israel has occupied since 1967, holding elections would require Israeli approval. Israel has not yet commented on the PA’s declaration.

In 2021, scheduled legislative and presidential elections in the Palestinian Territories were ultimately cancelled after Israel would not guarantee that voting could be held in East Jerusalem.

It’s 2026, gas prices are still too high, and oil executives are warning the White House that costs could get worse before they get better. The Trump Administration is taking note. 

And if the Democrats want to win in November they will need  to stop talking like policy wonks and start talking like consumers. 

Environmentalists love to talk about climate targets, emissions pathways, and the latest technologies, but voters are thinking about something simpler: the utility bill on the kitchen counter, the price at the pump, and whether the lights are going to stay on in a summer heat wave. 

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been hindering our country’s energy resources for the last year and a half. They are paying off companies to stop them from building new energy supplies. Last month, the Interior Department paid TotalEnergies $1 billion to walk away from two offshore wind leases off the coast of New York and North Carolina, projects that would have powered nearly one million homes. Seven states recently sued the Trump Administration over this decision. 

While the Administration pays companies to cancel new power generation, it forces ratepayers to subsidize older, costlier coal plants that should have been retired years ago. The Department of Energy has ordered six aging plants to stay online past their planned retirement. One plant in Michigan racked up over $180 million in costs, over $600,000 every single day the plant is forced to remain open, passed on to customers across 11 states, and an independent analysis found the full program could cost ratepayers nationwide between $3 billion and $6 billion each year. Three of the five forced-open coal plants are not even producing electricity. Voters are paying for aging, dirty and unreliable coal plants that often aren’t even running or working.

What has the Trump Administration done for voters? Household electricity bills in Pennsylvania, the country's second-largest natural gas producer, have climbed 31% since 2020, faster than the national average. Nearly one in four Pennsylvanians say they struggled to pay an energy bill in 2024. One woman in West Virginia took out a loan this winter to cover an electric bill bigger than her paycheck. U.S. power consumption hit record highs this year and is forecast to keep climbing as data center demand accelerates. 

Voters are taking notice. Our polling in battleground districts found that 70% oppose the actions Trump and his allies have taken on energy, 69% oppose canceling wind and solar projects, and 69% oppose new rules to make renewable energy harder to build. By a two-to-one margin, voters prefer new clean energy to new fossil fuel sources to meet rising demand. Even a third of Republicans agree.

For Democrats, the winning message is not complicated. Americans want more energy of all kinds, delivered fast, at lower cost, on a reliable grid that can handle a hotter climate, a more electrified economy, and rising demand from technologies like AI. 

The candidate who says, “I'm for building more power and bringing your costs down,” is on much stronger ground than the candidate who sounds like they are refereeing an ideological fight between students in a Harvard seminar.

There are three things every Democratic candidate should be saying out loud between now and November.

First, call it out: MAGA Republicans are responsible for raising your electric bill. The federal government is paying companies not to build new supply, forcing aging coal plants to keep running, and gutting the tax credits that bring new energy generation online faster and cheaper. 

Second, talk about getting results quickly. The new gas plants MAGA Republicans want will take the better part of a decade to permit, finance, and bring online. With AI usage soaring, that’s not fast enough. A utility-scale solar and storage project can be permitted, built, and delivering power in three years. Candidates can lower voters’ bills by committing to cutting permitting timelines, fixing transmission queues, and getting new generation connected to the grid. 

Five years after Winter Storm Uri exposed the catastrophic failure of the Texas grid, Texas has added more renewable capacity than any state in the country. ERCOT now operates one of the world's largest battery storage fleets. Texas electricity rates are the lower than the national average and roughly 30% below California’s. 

Third, ensure companies pay their fair share. The buildout that data centers and large industrial users are driving should not show up on a retiree’s utility bill. Mikie Sherrill ran a version of this in New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger ran a version of this in Virginia. Both won. Neither sounded like a climate candidate. Democrats are trying to fuel innovation and ensure the companies who benefit most foot the bill.

Our opponents will keep saying what Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been saying for a year: that fossil fuels are the path to “energy dominance.” When we tested that frame against voters, it fell flat. The phrase voters used in our research, unprompted, was that the MAGA energy playbook sounded “ripped out of 1986.” 

Democrats have a once-in-a-generation opening to advance a clean energy agenda. Taking advantage depends entirely on whether they can stop sounding like the party of taking energy away from voters and start sounding like a party determined to build more of it.

And it’s not just Democrats. Our research shows that Republican candidates who embrace clean energy might have the most to gain, if they can credibly distance themselves from Trump’s actions.  

The data indicate we can win this fight. We just have to be willing to wage it.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters at the NATO summit in Ankara that the initial agreement to end the war between the United States and Iran—which had largely halted the hostilities—was “over.” Washington and Tehran have traded military strikes over the past two days.

Fears of a reignited conflict are rising, even as the true cost of war is only beginning to be tallied. Alongside the thousands of deaths, the destruction of infrastructure, and the global economic costs, the war is exacerbating existing climate vulnerabilities and exposing the people of the region to an increasingly dangerous and nearly uninhabitable reality.

A combination of conflict and climate change has most acutely affected Iran and the broader Middle East and North Africa. Water is rationed, temperatures are breaking records, and droughts have been increasingly severe. Temperatures in the region are expected to rise by twice the global average during the 21st century. Syria, Libya, and Yemen have already endured civil wars and protracted humanitarian crises. Climate change and conflict share a complex, multidimensional relationship, each capable of exacerbating the other.

Iran war and climate crisis

The war with Iran has reinforced this threat-multiplying dynamic, displacing millions throughout Iran and Lebanon. On Mar. 7, Iran accused the U.S. of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the southern province of Hormozgan, near the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed the attack had disrupted the water supply for 30 villages.

The very next day, Bahrain accused Iran of firing a drone that damaged a desalination plant—a facility absolutely critical to the tiny Gulf state for converting seawater into drinking water. Around the same time, the United Arab Emirates reported an attack on the Fujairah F1 power and water plant. Iran, meanwhile, claimed that two water reservoirs were damaged and thousands of people lost access to drinking water following American strikes on the southern Iranian towns of Jask and Sirik in early June.

Desalination meets more than two-thirds of total water demand in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa, a region under extreme climate change-induced water stress. And such attacks are not merely tactics of war, but the brutal intersection of the logic of war and the logic of climate vulnerability.

Scholarly research demonstrates that water scarcity induced by climate change and conflict exacerbates security vulnerabilities across the Middle East and North Africa, a dynamic that has fueled increased conflict, fragility, and violence in the past. Water resources in the region were already critically strained before the war; Gulf states, Iran, and Iraq had experienced some of the worst climate-induced droughts on record. 

Beyond targeted attacks on desalination plants, strikes against civilian and industrial infrastructure since war started—including strikes on oil facilities and chemical plants—have polluted the region’s already fragile waterways. As World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned, attacks on petroleum facilities in Iran at the outset of the war, including those targeting the Shahran oil depot and the Shahr-e Rey refinery in Tehran, risked “contaminating food, water, and air,” with potentially severe health consequences for children and the elderly.

The conflict is also deepening these vulnerabilities by diverting governments’ attention, capacity, and funding away from the climate resilience and adaptation investments their populations urgently need. The war has caused at least $58 billion in damage to energy infrastructure across the Gulf, and slashed tourism revenues by around $600 million a day since hostilities began. The result is regional governments left with fewer resources to adapt to the worsening climate crisis, including efforts to combat water scarcity.

All this is unfolding during the “great aid recession,” with eight of the ten largest humanitarian donors having cut funding since 2022. The result is populations ever more vulnerable to tensions over water, energy, and food access, tensions that risk stoking displacement, particularly among the more vulnerable groups: refugees, farmers, and women.

Wars and greenhouse gases

The greenhouse gas emissions generated by the war add yet another dimension to an already grave situation. The conflict’s military activity is compounding the medium and long-term climate pressures already bearing down on the region. Estimates suggest that in its first two weeks alone, the war produced five million tons of CO2 emissions, more than the combined annual emissions of 84 countries.

The sources are varied: the destruction of homes and buildings, the burning of fuel reserves, the fuel consumed in combat operations, the embodied carbon of military equipment, and the production and use of missiles and drones. And eventual post-war reconstruction efforts will further add to the emissions.

Even after the war ends, experts expect military spending to rise, driven by an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape. Higher military spending means higher military emissions. The White House’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request, submitted weeks after the war began, would generate an estimated 267 megatons of carbon pollution. All of this imposes a double burden on the climate crisis: more emissions and less investment available for the transition to renewables or the adaptation of societies to effects of climate change they already face.

A durable end to the war remains an urgent priority, but the risks do not end there. Climate change will continue to exacerbate conflict long after the guns fall silent, with profound implications for human security, national stability, and international peace.

The conflict deepens these implications on three fronts: the targeting of desalination plants and the disruption of clean water access are pushing an already water-scarce region closer to the edge; governments are redirecting resources away from necessary investments in adaptation and resilience; and the conflict’s CO2 emissions are amplifying the very climate pressures driving that scarcity.

The combined pressures of war and climate are already reshaping the movement of people across the region. Thousands of migrant workers from South Asia returned home following the outbreak of war, affecting the role of remittances in their local economies. Still, the majority of workers in the Gulf countries have chosen to stay given the absence of better economic opportunities in their homelands.

The region was already home to 24.3 million forcibly displaced people before the war began. According to the United Nations refugee agency, an additional 3.2 million people have since been internally displaced in Iran and more than one million in Lebanon. The conflict is yet another stark example of how the logic of war is increasingly colliding with the logic of climate vulnerability—a collision that persists despite the continued denial of climate reality by some of the world’s most powerful leaders. 

Understanding this dynamic can help us better grasp why desalination plants in Iran and Bahrain or cultivated land in Lebanon are becoming ever more common targets of military strategy. In a region where climate change has already strained access to critical resources for millions, every day that the conflict remains unresolved is another day the people of the region must confront threats to their very survival.

The Trump Administration is promoting a new, privately owned “network” of gas stations that are selling fuel at prices notably below national and regional averages. 

“The FIRST Freedom Fuel Network gas station has LANDED in Philadelphia, lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th President,” the White House announced on X on Tuesday. “President Trump is leading the charge to lower gas prices this summer - putting more money in your pocket.” 

By comparison, the average regular gas price as of Thursday was $3.84 per gallon nationwide and $3.99 per gallon in Pennsylvania, according to AAA.

President Donald Trump first announced the opening of the gas stations in a Truth Social post last week, in which he said a “VERY smart Retailer, located throughout the Northeast” was behind them and was opening up the stations “because they love the U.S.A.”

So far, the “Freedom Fuel Network” has launched 25 stations, adorned with decals of the American flag and advertising cheap gas. Twenty are located in Pennsylvania and another five in New Jersey, according to the network’s website. 

The Freedom Fuel Network is a private company, a White House official confirms to TIME, and owns all 25 locations.

“The Administration is not involved in the company, nor has the Administration given the company any funding,” a White House official tells TIME. “There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs.”

Few other details have been made public about the initiative, including about who’s behind the venture and how the business is operating behind the lower prices. 

“The President has called for companies to lower their prices at the pump; this company responded to the President’s call for action,” the White House official says. “They are simply reducing their margin to make prices at the pump more affordable for drivers in Philadelphia and New Jersey. This retailer is taking the lead, others should follow.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the first location, opened on Tuesday, was converted from a previous Sunoco station in Dresher, Pennsylvania. Patrick De Hann, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, a tech company that helps people find cheaper gas, told the outlet that the pricing model of Freedom Fuel could not be profitable. 

“Stations selling at this price, it’s not sustainable,” De Haan said. “Generally, when losses happen, somebody’s got to pay for it.”

Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts accused the Trump Administration of running the gas stations and suggested that such involvement in the initiative would be hypocritical, referencing the Administration’s critiques of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for public grocery stores.

“Government-subsidized grocery stores = Communism. Government run gas stations = Freedom. Got it,” the congressman wrote on X in response to the White House’s Tuesday announcement. 

Earlier in his second term, Trump assured Americans that gas prices would “soon” drop below $2 per gallon. 

The President’s war with Iran, however, has caused prices to surge in recent months. Amid the spike, he has repeatedly promised that the increase is temporary and prices will drop again before long, and sparked controversy in May when he dismissed the rising costs as “peanuts.”

Last month, the President accused oil companies of price gouging and called for a Department of Justice investigation. “The big oil companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for oil,” he said. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’”

The Palm Beach International Airport was officially renamed to the President Donald J. Trump International Airport on Thursday, becoming the latest place to take on the President’s name since he took office for a second term.

The Florida airport announced the change on social media early Thursday morning, changing its handle on X to bear the new name and saying that staffers were “working behind the scenes to update our physical signage, terminal spaces, and digital channels to our new name.”

The President’s son, Eric Trump, said that his father’s plane, which he was on, was the first flight to land at the newly-branded airport.

“There is no person who has done more for Florida and our country, and no one more deserving of this incredible honor,” Eric Trump said in a post on X. “As a son, and someone who flies out of this airport nearly every day, I will forever be proud to see the initials ‘DJT’ on my boarding pass.”

Here’s what to know about the change.

Why was the airport renamed?

In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill to rename the Palm Beach airport after Trump, after state lawmakers passed the legislation. The Trump Organization had previously submitted trademark applications for possible airport names.

The President frequently travels through the Palm Beach hub, as it’s close to his Mar-a-Lago estate.

There are a number of airports across the country named after U.S. Presidents, such as New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. But the Palm Beach rebranding makes Trump the first President to have an airport named after him while in the White House.

When does the name change go into effect?

The airport was officially renamed on Thursday, but it said on its website that “transition activities, including updates to signage, branding and public-facing materials, will occur in phases.”

Will the name change affect airport operations?

The airport said on its website that “airport operations and services will continue without interruption” and that flight routes and schedules will not be impacted by the change. It added that “this is a branding change only,” and that the airport’s ownership and governance will not undergo any changes.

The three-letter identifier that airlines and travelers reference for services related to their flights, such as ticketing and baggage handling, will change from “PBI” to “DJT,” but the airport said on its website that that change will go into effect on Aug. 18. Until that date, travelers should stick to using the original code, “PBI.”

As of Thursday afternoon, some airline booking sites, such as Delta’s portal, recognized both codes, while others, such as American Airlines, only recognized the original PBI identifier.

How much is the rebranding going to cost?

According to the airport’s website, the Palm Beach County Department of Airports predicted that the total cost of rolling out the new name for the travel hub would be roughly $5.5 million. That amount will cover the price of changing airport signage, branding, and printed materials, among other items.

The state has allocated $2.75 million in funding for the rebranding, according to the airport’s website. The rest of the funding for the project will come from the Department of Airports' operating budget and capital improvement program. The airport said that the rebranding “does not result in a separate fee charged to passengers.”

Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner has suspended his campaign following sexual assault allegations, leaving an open question of who will take his place on the November ballot. 

Platner, who has denied the allegations against him, released a video on Wednesday in which he announced his exit from the race while stressing that his decision to drop out was not “an admission of guilt.”

Read More: Graham Platner Drops Out of Maine Senate Race After Sexual Assault Allegations

In the 11-minute video posted on X, Platner said that “what comes next needs to come from the people,” who he said voted “against the political system, against the donor class, against the entrenched forces.” He said he is not trying to “dictate” who the next nominee will be, but stressed that the process of choosing that person “needs to be open, transparent, and Democratic” while “reflecting the will and values of the people” that voted for him. 

“People in D.C. need to stay in D.C. Decisions should not be made in backrooms by people in places of political power,” Platner said.

The Democratic Party has until July 27 to select a new nominee to go up against Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins in the midterms. The seat, which Collins has held for nearly 30 years, is considered key to Democrats’ battle to regain control of the upper chamber.

Several candidates have already thrown their hat in the ring, while others have teased possible runs or had their names floated in recent days.

Here’s what to know about how Democrats will choose Platner’s replacement, and the potential candidates in the mix. 

The selection process

A Maine election law allows the Democratic Party to select a new candidate as long as Platner officially withdraws himself from the ballot by 5 p.m. on July 13—which Jana Spaulding, Maine’s deputy secretary of state for communications, told The Washington Post he had yet to do as of Thursday morning.

If he does formally remove his name, the party would be granted two weeks after that date to choose his replacement, giving them until July 27. The Maine Democratic Party would then be legally responsible for replacing him.

The state party held an emergency meeting on Wednesday, in which over 100 state committee members voted to hold a convention to select the next nominee. The party announced in a letter that details surrounding the nomination process, timeline, and requirements for candidates would be given “soon.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the letter reads. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

The potential candidates 

Troy Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, announced his bid for Senate following Platner’s exit. 

“I’m in. And we're going to defeat Susan Collins,” Jackson wrote on X. “Maine deserves a Senator that will fight for working families.”

Jackson is a progressive Democrat and logger from rural Maine who served in the state legislature—first in the lower chamber and then the upper—for more than 20 years. He previously mounted a bid for the state’s governorship, but fell short in last month’s primary election.

Our Revolution, a progressive group founded by Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, endorsed Jackson on Wednesday, saying that he “has spent his life in the fight working people are asking for, not arriving to it just because a seat opened up.”. 

Dan Kleban, a brewery founder who previously dropped out of the Democratic Senate primary and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills before Platner’s victory, also announced he would run to replace the withdrawing nominee on Wednesday. 

“Mainers deserve a senator who will fight for them against the D.C. establishment while also doing what’s right,” Kleban said in a statement. “I plan to be that senator.”

Nirav Shah, an epidemiologist who served as Maine’s public health director, announced his bid on Thursday in a post on X. 

“I’m proud to have dedicated my career to public service, and to have delivered for Mainers in our darkest times,” said Shah, who led Maine through COVID-19. “Now, in this unprecedented moment, I’m ready to unite our party and fight for you once again.”

Jordan Wood, a former Capitol Hill chief of staff, also announced he would be running. Wood launched a bid for the seat last year as well, but transitioned to instead run for the House in the state’s second congressional district—a race he lost in last month’s primary.

“It's official: I'm running to defeat Susan Collins,” Wood wrote on X on Thursday. “Together we'll stop ICE from terrorizing our streets, pass Medicare for All, and end Citizens United.”

Social worker Paige Loud filed paperwork to enter the Senate race with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday after she, too, lost in the primary for Maine’s second congressional district. 

David Costello, who garnered eight percent of the vote in the earlier primary election for the Senate seat that Platner won, also told The New York Times on Thursday that he was re-entering the race. 

Others have teased possible runs, but have not officially confirmed bids to replace Platner. 

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said in a statement on Tuesday that she would “seriously consider entering this race, because I believe I am uniquely fit to unite Mainers and defeat Susan Collins in just over 100 days.” Bellows also mounted an unsuccessful campaign in this year’s Maine governor race, and previously ran against Collins in 2014.

Valli Geiger, a member of the Maine state House, told The New York Times on Wednesday that she would potentially join the race. She said in an interview with The Maine Wire the same day that Platner had encouraged her to do so and said he would support her. 

Platner has not yet publicly endorsed any candidate for his replacement.

Outgoing Maine Gov. Janet Mills could also be a contender. Having won almost 20% of the vote in the primary against Platner even after suspending her campaign amid his surge in the polls, Mills, who was recruited and backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, has not confirmed she will enter the race to replace  Platner as the nominee. The 78-year-old did previously say that if she were elected, she would only serve one term. 

Rep. Jared Golden, who is retiring from the House after representing Maine’s second congressional district in the chamber for three terms, had also been speculated as a potential candidate for the nomination. But on Wednesday, he confirmed that he would not seek it. 

The name of actor Patrick Dempsey, best known for his role in the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” was floated as well, but he too confirmed that he would not run on Wednesday.

Five-Star Weekend, a Peacock series out July 9, is about a food influencer Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) who is in need of a new kind of nourishment after her husband Matthew (Josh Hamilton) dies suddenly in a car accident. 

In the eight-episode series—adapted from a Elin Hilderbrand novel by the same name—Hollis organizes a girls’ weekend at her house on Nantucket and invites a friend from each stage of her life. But the women also bring their own baggage to the island, literally and figuratively. So does Hollis, who has been hiding that she and Matthew were not happily married in the end. 

Here’s a breakdown of each character’s messy back story and the show’s surprisingly happy ending.

A recipe for drama

Five Star Weekend starts on a wintry Massachusetts day, with Hollis in her kitchen talking about how she feels happiest there, cooking and baking for people. In fact, she’s making elaborate Christmas cookies when police officers show up to tell her that her husband has died. 

Six months later, Hollis is on The TODAY Show, telling host Jenna Bush Hager that she got into cooking after her mother died and she took charge of cooking for herself and her father. Then she bursts into tears on air while she’s cutting onions, explaining that everything makes her cry after her husband’s death. Afterwards, her publicist suggests she try to work through her grief by inviting some girlfriends over. 

Hollis gets to planning a girls’ weekend. But since she hasn’t stayed in regular touch with these women, she doesn’t realize that they are all dealing with major problems of their own.

Dru-Ann Jones (Regina Hall) is a college friend and a sports agent who is under fire for publicly dismissing one of her clients who wanted to take a break from playing soccer to focus on mental health. Throughout the show, she is not only helping Hollis heal her damaged heart, but is also in damage control mode at her job.

Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) is a childhood friend who runs a dry cleaner on the island and is awaiting results from a biopsy on her breast. She feels like Hollis drifted apart from her to socialize with a more upper-class orbit.

Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), a mom friend who lives near Hollis in suburban Wellesley, Mass., is married to a corporate lawyer facing a lawsuit brought by an intern who is accusing him of sexual harassment. 

Gigi (Gemma Chan) is a commercial pilot who developed an internet friendship with Hollis after she reached out offering to be a sounding board when Matthew died. She’s the only one who doesn’t know anyone on the trip, so the other friends are trying to figure out how she got invited. 

And unbeknownst to Hollis, her own daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane) is flunking out of Amherst College because she misses her father so much. Originally enrolled as a pre-med student to follow in her surgeon father’s footsteps, she is thinking about switching majors, but doesn’t know how to talk to her mom about that or her grief.

Tensions simmering

Hollis is channeling Martha Stewart all weekend, creating an elaborate itinerary that includes five-star meals inside and outside of the home, spa sessions, dance parties, shopping excursions—and even an ice cream truck that rolls up to her house.

Her friends are grumbling that she’d rather play homemaker than open up about how she’s really feeling after Matthew. But whenever they implore her to tell them how she’s really feeling, Hollis is brutally honest about how she feels like she’s hanging on by a thread and insists that she is not trying to hide the pain, but that she really needs a weekend of dance parties and cooking to distract her. In a distraction she doesn’t expect, her ex is on the island, and they have never stopped thinking about each other.

Meanwhile, the girls’ weekend turned out to be a time of self-discovery for Brooke, who realizes she has shrunk her identity to accommodate her husband. Gigi gives her a makeover, and she’s so grateful for the new duds that she kisses Gigi on the lips. She apologizes profusely, and Gigi insists it does not have to be a big deal and that they can move on. But it unearths something deeper in Brooke. Her husband has never satisfied her sexually. And he keeps calling her to make sure she’ll support him through his lawsuit. When Brooke finally asks him if he really did do something inappropriate with the intern, he doesn’t deny anything. So she decides to follow her heart and flirts with a local female tour guide named Sunny, bonding with her over a shared love for history.

The boiling point

During what’s supposed to be a weekend of feasting, Gigi is eaten up by guilt. She had an affair with Matthew, and she hopes to come clean to Hollis on this trip. But before she can tell Hollis herself, Brooke figures it out when she sees a picture of Gigi and Matthew on Gigi’s phone screen. 

A heated confrontation follows in a sauna room during the planned spa day—amplified by the weed mints that the women ingested. Gigi admits to Brooke that Matthew was the first person she ever loved and that her online conversations with Hollis helped her feel connected to Matthew after his passing. Meanwhile, Hollis, the baking influencer, is so baked wandering around that she starts seeing Matthew in the spa rooms.

While Gigi tried to tell Hollis the truth about her relationship with Matthew multiple times—even writing her a letter that she never delivers—it’s Brooke who ends up breaking the news to Hollis. In front of an ice cream truck parked outside of Hollis’s house, Brooke blurts out the not-so-sweet truth that Gigi was having an affair with Matthew. 

Now the distance Hollis felt with Matthew at the time of his passing makes sense, plus all of Matthew’s planned domestic and international air travel; he was meeting Gigi on her route. She also recalls that he’d get texts from someone named “G,” and he always assured Hollis she was just an OR nurse messaging about work stuff. And now it made sense why Matthew had been driving to the airport when he got into a car accident: he was driving to meet Gigi.

Cooling off

The opening scene of the last episode is a flashback to Hollis’s kitchen in Wellesley, where she is grilling Matthew on why he is going to Paris if the conference he’s supposedly going to is in Berlin. If the viewer did not already see the proof in the pudding, then this scene makes it clear that Matthew was not going to a work conference, but planning to see Gigi. 

Hollis questions whether Matthew is really going to a work conference given the timing over the holiday season and calls him out. She acknowledges that she’s been busy with her social media accounts, and their daughter Caroline has moved out to go to college, but insists that they need to try to adapt to the new normal together. Matthew says it’s sad that they need to “try” at all. 

The next scene fast-forwards to the present, where Gigi is passed out in a bed in Hollis’s house after a bender. Instead of confessing to Hollis herself, she drank herself into oblivion at a local bar, and Caroline had to carry her back to the house. 

Hollis hears a noise outside, and when she walks out, she finds her ex, Jack (Timothy Olyphant) on a ladder cleaning her gutters. He says he noticed they needed maintenance but that’s not the real reason why he came over. She confesses that she’d have dreams about him and wake up sweating next to Matthew. They share a kiss and hook up in Hollis’s bed. 

The next morning, Gigi is nowhere to be found, and Jack is cooking her breakfast. Hollis and Jack are talking about how great the prior night was, and Hollis is in the middle of telling Jack how she’s not ready to be in a romantic relationship when Gigi walks in holding a box of morning buns. 

Hollis and Gigi retreat to the laundry room to talk in private (though all the friends are listening at the door). Gigi reveals to Hollis that Matthew “was going to choose you.” Before he died, Matthew left Gigi a voicemail saying they needed to talk; Gigi says he was going to break up with her. Hollis looks back at the accident report, which shows that Matthew was driving back toward their house—to Hollis—when he died. 

Hollis tells Gigi she will forgive her because she doesn’t want there to be anger between them. She hands her a party favor of toffee with cardamom, her version of an olive branch.

An ending as sweet as honey

Given all of the drama going into the weekend, the show wraps up with happy endings for the characters. The weekend made the women all best friends with one another, and they immediately started brainstorming destinations for another girls’ trip for the same time next year. 

When Gigi leaves, Hollis makes everyone pancakes with sad faces drawn on them “because my marriage was a lie.” Then the four women dump Matthew’s comically large stash of protein powder into the ocean.

On the beach, Tatum receives her biopsy report. It’s not good news—the lump doctors found is benign but they find abnormal cells forming behind it. But by the end of the show she is feeling optimistic because she knows she is surrounded by supportive family members—and now the friends she made during the girls’ weekend. Tatum and Hollis share a tender moment over a cigarette in which Hollis vows to call her the next day and stay in touch better. 

Brooke is heading home a changed woman. Over the weekend, her husband showed up to Hollis’s house, demanding she come home and even telling their kids that she was trying to break up the family by leaving them. She rightfully tells him to get lost. In an even sweeter turn, she runs into Sunny on the ferry, where they kiss and vow to continue seeing each other on the mainland. 

Brooke runs up to Dru-Ann and shares excitedly that she has a girlfriend. Dru-Ann too has had a transformative weekend. She still has her job as a sports agent because it’s revealed that her client pretended to need a break to deal with mental health struggles just so she could watch her boyfriend play basketball. But she resents the way the colleagues at her agency did not support her during the controversy and decides she’s going to quit and launch her own talent agency. She’s always been a surrogate mother to Caroline when Caroline needed someone to talk to, and she feels similarly toward her client Posey. Following this strength—her ability to listen and offer guidance well—feels like the right move for Dru-Ann. 

By the end of the show, Hollis is on much better terms with her friends. But perhaps the most important relationship Hollis restored was her relationship with her daughter. Caroline has had a wild time on Nantucket, spending most of the show outside of Hollis’s house hanging out with Tatum’s daughter Aubrey (West Duchovny)...and flirting with a bartender who turns out to be the father of Aubrey’s baby and her on-again-off-again boyfriend. By the end of the weekend, she’s realized that grieving her father will take time. Pushing against her mother isn’t going to help. 

Once Hollis learns the truth about Matthew, she is desperate to keep it from Caroline. But Caroline tells her mom that she figured it out anyway. “I’m an adult person with eyes and ears,” she says. She begs her mom not to hide her feelings from her because it makes it hard for her to confide in her—and she wants to confide in her because Hollis is her only parent now. 

Hollis turns down a TV appearance to spend more time with Caroline on Nantucket, and the two talk about what’s next for the youngster. Caroline suggests she might want to switch gears from the pre-med track to something in photography. The episode ends with Hollis and Caroline running into Jack during a golden-hour walk on the beach and heading back to her house to eat leftovers. 

Overall, it was a messy but clarifying weekend for everyone.