The Interior Department added $6.2 million to the no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial pool late last week.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.
The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.
Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.
Image
“Every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered,” a lawsuit filed Monday said.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
The contractor was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”
The pool has also been troubled for decades by leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.
The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
An Essential Shot: Vitamin K shots, which help the blood to clot, are one of three key interventions for newborns, along with an antibiotic eye ointment and the hepatitis B vaccine.
Increasing Rejections: The government doesn’t track vitamin K rejections, but hospitals have seen a rise in parents opting out of the shots for their newborns, often driven by unfounded fears.
Troubling Data: Hundreds of children die each year from spontaneous bleeding in the brain, a common result of vitamin K deficiency, suggesting that many related deaths go unreported.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.
Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.
Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.
None of it was enough.
At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.
Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.
Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.
Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.
The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.
Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.
“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.
“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”
Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.
Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.
Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.
Determining precisely how many babies have died or suffered severe brain damage because of a lack of vitamin K is difficult. State and federal agencies don’t track data around vitamin K injection refusal or subsequent bleeding, which impedes their ability to quantify and track outcomes, including death.
The number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K deficiency bleeding appears to be small — fewer than a dozen annually — but has started to climb in recent years, according to death certificate data from federal and state agencies.
But those numbers capture only a fraction of deaths, which often are classified only by other, more immediate causes, such as bleeding in the brain. In 2024, for example, more than 700 newborns died from spontaneous bleeding in their brains, which could have been complicated by liver disease or prematurity. Still, six medical specialists and one official at the CDC said a meaningful portion of those deaths likely were caused by vitamin K deficiency. Many more babies survive the bleeding but suffer massive brain bleeds and lasting injuries.
“A lot of the providers don’t have this on their radar,” said Dr. Jaspreet Loyal, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale Medicine. “The lack of data is almost acting like a reassurance for families that this risk is worth taking.”
Although it is difficult to quantify deaths attributable to vitamin K deficiency, there is clearly a large jump in the number of parents declining the vitamin K shot. Some hospitals have seen refusal rates more than double. A national study of more than 5 million births, published in December, found that the rate of U.S. babies not receiving vitamin K at birth topped 5% in 2024 — up 77% from 2017.
More Newborns Are Not Getting Vitamin K Shots
More than 5% of newborns in the U.S. did not receive vitamin K shots in 2024.
Source: “Trends in Vitamin K Administration Among Infants,” JAMA
The success of the shot has been so remarkable that it nearly eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding altogether. The science was settled decades ago.
“This was not something we even bothered to spend much educational effort on,” said Dr. Allison Henry, the director of newborn medicine service at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s in Los Angeles, “because there was this simple, safe intervention.”
A cluster of cases 13 years ago was one of the first major signs that something was amiss.
Four babies were rushed to a Nashville, Tennessee, children’s hospital after they suddenly fell ill months apart. Stunned, doctors ran tests that revealed severe bleeding and reached out to Dr. Robert Sidonio Jr., their blood disorder specialist. They learned that the parents had declined vitamin K shots for the babies, each of them between 6 and 15 weeks old.
Once they realized that, the medical team moved quickly to treat them, injecting them with vitamin K and hoping it wasn’t too late. Much to the relief of doctors, they all survived. Only one infant had developmental delays.
The parents explained that they had declined the shot for a number of reasons: a concern, based on long-debunked claims, that the shot could cause leukemia; a belief that the shot wasn’t necessary; and a desire to reduce their baby’s exposure to “toxins.”
The CDC and the state health department opened an investigation and later published a report that found that when the parents declined the shot, their awareness about the risk of bleeding was “incomplete or absent.”
Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, said she had witnessed a gradual rise in families refusing vitamin K leading up to the hospitalizations.
She and her colleagues went into the Nashville community to speak at birthing centers and advise families about the benefits of vitamin K. One mother who had refused the shot for her newborn partnered with Morad and described how she came to realize that the shot can save lives.
More than a dozen pediatricians interviewed by ProPublica said they strongly recommend all three of the typical newborn interventions but agreed that the vitamin K shot is the most vital.
“I’m picking vitamin K every day,” Morad said. “Absolutely.”
With time, the number of families who turned down the shot dropped. As the need for the community outreach waned, Morad lost touch with the mother she had teamed up with and refocused her energy on directing the newborn nursery at Vanderbilt Health.
“I’ll be honest, I thought we had turned the corner,” Morad said. “Naively, I thought that would be enough.”
Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, says the vitamin K shot is the most essential of three interventions that newborns are typically given. “I’m picking vitamin K every day. Absolutely.”Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica
All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.
Doctors have yet to understand why some babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are fine while others bleed uncontrollably. But they do know that the risk increases dramatically. For babies who don’t get the shot, the risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding from a week after birth to 6 months ranges from 1 in 14,000 to 1 in 25,000 births. With the shot, the research shows, the risk drops to less than 1 in 100,000.
The role of vitamin K is so crucial that researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies. The official presenting the award called the discovery the vitamin’s “greatest practical importance” and lauded it among the discoveries that have been of great benefit to humankind.
In 1961, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that all newborns in the U.S. get a shot of vitamin K. The CDC has supported newborns getting the shot as well, devoting several pages online to raising awareness around vitamin K deficiency bleeding and writing that babies may bleed “into their intestines, or into their brain, which can lead to brain damage and even death.” For decades, medical textbooks and lectures have presented the vitamin K injection as an example of a public health policy success.
After reports that vitamin K deficiency bleeding was on the rise, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy statement in 2022 to stress the shot’s safety and efficacy. The paper included talking points for pediatricians to help them respond to common misconceptions: “Vitamin K injection does not contain mercury. Vitamin K does not cause cancer. The vitamin K injection used in newborns is safe. The dose is not too high for newborns.”
“We’re a victim of our own success,” said Dr. Ivan Hand, the director of neonatology at Kings County Hospital Center in New York and the co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics statement. “Since we’ve been treating babies with vitamin K, we haven’t seen much deficiency bleeding, so people think it doesn’t exist.”
Seeing photos online of healthy babies who didn’t get the vitamin K shot and reading comments from parents who felt justified in their refusal, it’s easy to think that the risk of bleeding isn’t real, or at the very least that it’s exaggerated.
On Facebook, comments about the shot include: “Don’t do it!” “Huge lie!” and “It’s a scare tactic.” One person wrote, “Never will I ever inject my baby with poisons from big pharma.”
Families have also pointed to a 2023 episode about vitamin K shots by conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who said, “What Big Pharma is saying is that we realize that babies were born wrong. They don’t have enough vitamin K, and so we’re going to give them what they always needed. God designed us wrong.”
Owens did not respond to a request for comment.
Hidden is the agony of parents mourning the loss of their babies. Some are still in denial.
ProPublica spoke with five of those families, but none of them wanted to be identified publicly.
The obituaries, social media posts and GoFundMe pages capture the utter despair of the families, though none of them reckon with the decision not to get the vitamin K shot.
“No one could’ve prepared us for the heartbreak we faced 6 weeks after our little miracle was born,” one mother wrote. “She had a spontaneous unexplained brain bleed that led to brain death.”
“We miss his sweet smell,” another family wrote.
A third family, who made their decision after reading about vitamin K on social media and talking with their midwife, dismissed the vitamin K shot altogether. Instead, the father expressed outrage at the hospital for not delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord. He said he believed doing so would have allowed his son to be infused with vitamin K from the cord blood, a popular theory on social media. Research, however, shows that while delayed cord clamping can raise the baby’s hemoglobin levels, it does not have the same effect on vitamin K.
“I figured the hospital was already pissy with me because we didn’t vaccinate at all,” he told ProPublica. “They lost out on all the money from that.”
The family’s anger has subsided some since the baby’s death, in part because of their trust in God’s plan.
“I can sit here and be upset and sad, but this brought me closer to God,” the father said. “I just can’t wait to be with him.”
Two of the families who went on to have other children found themselves facing the same decision: Would they decline the vitamin K shot again? Both got the shot for their newborn.
Autopsy reports reviewed by ProPublica, like these two from children in Minnesota and Arizona, have notes from coroners citing vitamin K deficiency as a cause of death.Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica
Morad watched as the number of families declining vitamin K climbed over the last year.
In January, she reached out to Sidonio, her former colleague who first recognized the 2013 cluster of cases there, for advice. Sidonio, now a pediatric hematologist oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said he’s more worried than ever.
During that cluster, Sidonio recognized the need to collect data on how often parents decline the shot and what happens to those babies. But in discussions with the CDC, he said, he was told that it would be too difficult.
More than a decade later, nothing has come of it. In a recent email to ProPublica, federal officials said vitamin K deficiency bleeding has never been submitted for consideration as a notifiable condition.
“If you don’t track it, you don’t document it,” said Sidonio, frustration building in his voice. “They have to make it a reportable health condition, just like a new measles case. That’s the only way it’s going to change.”
Like him, Dr. Kristan Scott, the lead author of the national study that found a jump in the number of babies not receiving vitamin K, also landed on a need for a robust system to monitor vitamin K refusals and any subsequent consequences.
“We don’t have a clean data repository provided by public health systems or the state that would allow us to be able to track this in a more systematic fashion,” said Scott, who is a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Some doctors failed to recognize the role of vitamin K when a baby came into their emergency rooms, let alone knew how to reverse the damage from the declined shots. Many of them encountered the condition only in medical school textbooks.
Some hospitals have started to run their own numbers, but the effort is scattershot. The data is also usually kept in house, so there’s not a wider knowledge of the problem. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, officials at a handful of hospitals agreed to share their data with ProPublica.
Doctors at St. Louis-based Mercy, which runs birthing hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, began noticing an uptick in families turning down the vitamin K shot during the pandemic. Last year, 1,552 babies across all Mercy hospitals didn’t get the injection. In 2021, that number was 536.
And at Idaho’s largest hospital system, the refusal rates have gone up every year since the start of the pandemic, and in some cases have more than doubled. In 2020, 3.8% of families across St. Luke’s Health System declined the vitamin K shot for their babies. In 2025, that figure jumped to 9.8%. One hospital even reached 20% of babies not getting vitamin K shots.
At least two babies treated at St. Luke’s died within the last year from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. But Dr. Tom Patterson, a pediatrician who treats newborns at some St. Luke’s hospitals and is among the most vocal in warning about the climbing refusal rates, suspects there may be more.
Patterson recently pleaded with a family to allow their baby to get the shot. The father refused and shocked the doctor by going even further. He approached the nurses to complain about Patterson pushing the matter.
How We Reported This Story
As part of our reporting, ProPublica contacted 55 hospitals and birthing centers around the U.S.; interviewed more than 30 doctors; and filed nearly 90 public records requests with state and local health departments, medical examiners and other agencies. ProPublica also analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and examined hundreds of pages of medical and autopsy records.
Trump is a godless conman who knows not one sentence in the Bible, cheated on his wives, fucked a pornstar while his wife was pregnant, grifts and cons brainles rubes and cult members out of money they need with lies and various schemes. https://t.co/MB7mszrpmN
While Americans work a 2nd job so they can afford to get to their 1st job, Trump is focused on ballrooms, & gladiators fighting for his honor. pic.twitter.com/RhpqeYPq3d
Erika Kirk, who runs a white nationalist religious cult, just received an Honorary Doctorate on behalf of her dead racist podcaster husband. I’m fucking speechless. pic.twitter.com/jrZnmmhmYC
Inside Ben Shapiro’s MAGA meltdownThe Daily Wire was once ascendant in right-wing media. Now, the “anti-woke” company faces contentious layoffs, ideological battles and dwindling relevance online.www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2…
But it would have been allowed to celebrate a Christian only private event in the theocratic state of religious Texas. Hugs
A planned celebration of an important Muslim holiday at a Grand Prairie water park has been canceled after backlash from Texas Governor Greg Abbott over religious discrimination.
Doral Trump statue sculptor Alan Cottrill says no other commission has been as chaotic.Golden statue photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images; overlaid photo from Alan Cottrill. New Times photo collage.
A towering, gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump was unveiled with great fanfare on Wednesday at Trump National Doral golf course, in a dedication ceremony that included a prayer from a MAGA-aligned pastor who put the president on speakerphone. But the artist behind it had choice words when asked about the two-year creation process.
“This was a clusterfuck,” Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill tells New Times.
From his foundry in Zanesville (about an hour east of Columbus), Cottrill has worked on hundreds of commissioned statues now standing across the country, including multiple at the Ohio State University. But never has a commission been as chaotic as the crypto bro-funded, gold-leafed, looksmaxxed Trump unveiled this week at Trump’s golf club, he says.
“I usually deal with people that have everything organized. From the start, this was chaos,” Cottrill says. “I have 400 life-size or larger statues around the country. The patron sets a date when they want it installed, and I have it installed on that date. And almost never, anytime whatsoever, does anyone miss a payment, because I always do what I say I’ll do, and the patron always does what they say they’re going to.”
That wasn’t the case with the 15-foot (22 feet when you include the platform) Trump statue. Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”
The statue in question, seen near the ninth tee during the first round of the Cadillac Championship 2026 at Trump National Doral Miami on April 30 in Doral.
Tech bros Ashley Sansalone (a cryptocurrency developer based in Canada) and Dustin Stockton (a Republican strategist) teamed up with a group of other crypto bros to pay Cottrill $500,000 for the creation of a Trump statue based on the fist pump he gave after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. If Stockon’s name sounds familiar, it’s because authorities raided his property in connection with allegations that he was involved in defrauding donors of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s effort to crowdfund the southern border wall in Trump’s first term.
Sansalone and Stockton didn’t respond to New Times‘ requests for comment. But Stockton told the U.K paper The Times that the group did not agree with the sculptor’s description of what happened.
From Clay Clump to 15-Foot Trump
Cottrill, an Army veteran and founder of an international pizza chain, was in his late 30s when he touched clay for the first time and declared, “This is the mistress I’ve traveled the world in search of,” as he puts it in his website bio.
“Well, I tell people it’s kinda like the first time I kissed a girl. The minute I did that, man, that’s all I wanted to do,” Cottrill tells New Times.
From there, Cottrill built a business that’s attracted more than 500 commissions, with most standing in public places throughout the nation. In 2024, he got the call about making a giant Trump statue. The group of cryptocurrency acolytes, Stockton told The Times, was to highlight “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto.”
He said the group was in agreement: “If we are going to do this, we had to make it Trumpian.” Also, it had to look like gold.
When asked by New Times about his political leanings and whether he was excited by the commission request, Cottrill says, “No comment.”
The process of molding skinny Trump began with a life-sized clay model that wasn’t quite to the liking of Cottrill’s patrons, he said.
“I had him even skinnier than he is, a little bit. I knew they’d want that,” Cottrill said about the first model. “They said, ‘Oh, he’s too big.’ I’m close enough to his age, and I got some turkey neck going on, and I knew what that was. That’s what happens when you’re almost 80.”
Perhaps the only photo you’ll ever see of Trump fist-pumping in front of a pride flag. Photo from Alan Cottrill
Cottrill says it actually only took him four-and-a-half months to make the 50 pieces he’d put together to make the giant Trump. It took another year and a half, however, for the installation at Trump National Doral to happen because it took weeks for Sansalone and Stockton to make their final $90,000 payment.
The tech bros in 2024 paid an initial $300,000 for the initial statue, then paid another $60,000 a year later for the gold-leaf plating, and another $150,000 to use imagery of the statue to promote a crypto token, Cottrill said. But getting the payment was easier said than done.
“‘You were supposed to make these payments nearly a year ago. I can’t trust you to do that,’” Cottrill recalls telling his patrons. “So I held the statue. I put it in an undisclosed location and said it won’t be delivered until the final payments have been made.
“Like I told the crypto guys from the beginning, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t fuck around, so you don’t fuck around with me.’ And, like my daughter said, ‘They fucked around and found out.’”
After months of holding the statue hostage, the final payment finally came on April 22 with a phone call saying Cottrill had to have the statue installed the next day, ahead of the 2026 Cadillac Championship that ran April 30 to May 3.
“So I got in a truck with my foundry manager and we drove straight down and when we got to dropoff, we were told that we need this installed and all the gold leaf touched up by dawn tomorrow,” Cottrill said. “We usually would take three days to do all that, so we worked through the night till 4 a.m., and we finally finished. Then we slept two or three hours, got in the truck, and drove 18 hours straight back to Zanesville.”
Cottrill high-tailed it out of South Florida because he wasn’t actually invited to the unveiling and dedication ceremony that followed (another first for the sculptor).
When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”
“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”
Trump himself appeared to be pleased, writing on his platform Truth Social, “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami. Put there by great American Patriots!!! President DJT” However, the sculptor tells New Times, “don’t forget it’s just a normal bronze statue with a coating of gold leaf over the entire thing.”
A lot of gold leaf: “There were over 3000 3in.² leaves of 23.75 carat gold attached to the surface to cover the entire 15 foot statue,” he adds.
B. Scott McLendon joined New Times staff in 2025. A national award-winning journalist, he previously covered education, crime, courts, and local government for daily newspapers in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Troy University.
This was a private event held and paid for by the group for a set amount of time at the park. It is a normal occurrence at parks like this. If this had been a Christian church doing the event it would have caused no backlash and been accepted. But because it was a Muslim sponcered event with mostly clothing of this sect of the Islamic faith that also encouraged the eating of foods not normally eaten by Christians it caused a backlash of Islamophobia. Hate for people and customs different from the Christian religion practiced by white people is common in the nearly theocratic Texas. Hugs
The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
A private event at a Texas city-owned water park has been canceled following backlash and a direct threat by Gov. Greg Abbott to withhold more than $500,000 in state public safety funding.
A spokesperson for the City of Grand Prairie said Thursday the city canceled the DFW Epic Eid Celebration scheduled for June 1 at the Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark.
“After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled,” the spokesperson said.
The event at the city-owned waterpark was initially promoted with flyers describing it as “Muslims only” and included a modest dress code requiring burkinis for women, halal food, a private prayer room and rules encouraging attendees to maintain personal space and “lower the gaze.”
After backlash on social media, organizers updated promotional materials to state that “all are welcome,” provided attendees follow the modest dress code.
Abbott’s Public Safety Office shared a letter with The Christian Post that had been sent to Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen warning that the “DFW Epic Eid” event “was publicly and openly advertised as discriminating based on religion” and therefore violated agreements between the city and the Public Safety Office.
The letter from Public Safety Office Executive Director Andrew Friedrichs said the event “purports to be public facing and discriminatory at the same time” and compared it to advertising for a “Whites only” event.
“All Muslims — but only Muslims — may attend,” Friedrichs wrote. “An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution.”
Event organizer Dr. Aminah Knight later updated the online flyer to clarify that the DFW Eid Celebration is a “privately organized and privately funded event held through a standard rental of Epic Waters, just like many other private gatherings hosted at the park.”
“At its core, this event is about creating a space where individuals and families, particularly those who value modest dress and a modest environment, can come together and enjoy a recreational setting comfortably,” Knight wrote.
Knight added that anyone “of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code” is welcome to attend.
A screenshot of an online flyer for a 2025 “Muslims only” event at the Epic Indoor Waterpark in Grand Prairie, Texas. | Screenshot/Facebook
A Facebook post shared by Knight in May 2025 promoting last year’s event included a flyer calling it an “exclusive Muslim-only event” and stating that the taxpayer-funded facility was “closed to the public” for “Muslims only.”
It is unclear whether the City of Grand Prairie approved the flyer or its contents. The city did not respond to CP’s request for comment by Thursday afternoon.
While the 2026 event flyer listed Knight as the organizer, a video shared on social media by Muhammad Abdullah, listed as the director of Outreach & Youth at Al-Hedayah Academy in Fort Worth, claimed he organized the event.
In a video posted Tuesday, Abdullah blamed “Islamophobia” for the public response to the now-canceled event and said, “By the way, I’m organizing that with my wife.”
CP reached out to Al-Hedayah Academy, where Abdullah is pictured as a member of the mosque’s “spiritual team,” seeking clarification Thursday on whether the mosque was involved in organizing the event.
According to Knight, more than 600 people attended the event last year, and all “lovers of modest fashion and those who are curious about Eid and what modesty at a waterpark can look like” are welcome to attend.
Owned by the city of Grand Prairie near the Dallas and Tarrant County border, Epic Waters — which has no ties to the planned Muslim-centric development formerly known as “EPIC City” — is an 80,000-square-foot waterpark with a retractable roof and the longest indoor lazy river in North Texas, according to its website.
Epic Waters opened in 2017 after voters approved a 0.25% sales tax, according to city documents. The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
One of the many disqualifiers that should have prevented Donald Trump from becoming president again, and this one’s near the top of the list, is the way he handled the coronavirus pandemic.
When the pandemic hit our nation, Donald Trump should have been a leader. He should’ve been on the front lines in the response to the pandemic. He should have been telling the nation to follow the guidelines, even if they were changing as we learned more about the virus, and he should’ve been following them himself as an example. He should have been active in making sure that every state received the medical supplies it needed to save lives. (snip-MORE)
I just love animated film titles and credits. It’s a great way to grab the audience’s attention and give a glimpse of the movie they’re about to see. In the case of end credits, a clever animated sequence keeps the audience in their seats so proper acknowledgement can be given, not only to the stars but to all of the people who have worked on the film.
There are several Pink Panther movies with animated titles but my favorite is the first created by DePatie–Freleng Enterprises because of its simplicity and the interaction between the character and text/graphics.
Pixar’s Ratatuoille end credits, design lead Teddy Newton.Unlike the 3D computer generated style of the main body of the film, Ratatuoille’s end credits are in 2D. The character and background designs are wonderfully stylized and have the feel of loose sketches one would see in the conceptual stage of an animated feature. The color and music also contribute to this fantastic mini-movie. Love, love, love this.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids title sequence/ Kroyer FilmsAnother wonderful title sequence in a 2D style.
City Slickers title sequence/ Kurtz & FriendsAnother great use of a character interacting with the text (cowboy and lasso).
The video posted above is the end credits to Democracy Under Siege, the documentary some of you might have viewed last week. While I created the hand drawn gifs, all the credit for this marvelous sequence goes to Antoine Vermeesch of Clin d’oiel films. His selection of sound effects and music melded perfectly with the animation.
Kash Patel, the worst FBI Director in the history of the bureau, has ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, to find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.
They described Kash as being in panic mode to save his job after negative publicity about his drinking, partying, and other extracurricular activities had come to Donald Trump’s attention.
Kash demanded the polygraph examinations to determine if any members of the team that travels with him or staff who have access to sensitive details about his decisions have communicated with reporters, according to the people, who asked to speak anonymously due to the threat of retribution.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter who wrote that “excessive drinking” was causing deep concern in the bureau. Patel is suing The Atlantic for $250 million over the story. Because of the story, more informers from within the FBI are contacting Fitzpatrick and the magazine to provide dirt on Patel.
And because of these informers, we have learned that Patel is handing out personalized, branded bottles of bourbon. (snip-MORE)
My webcomic about a transgender girl’s page, Assigned Male Comics, is currently down because it got hacked during the night, along with my personal page and the french version of the comic. After receiving several thousands of death threats in the past few days for making my art, my address was also posted on several forums. I am currently in a safe place and my roommate and I will move away before the end of the week.
Today. May 17th. International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. I just want people to be aware that this is what you get for being trans on the internet and for reframing transness into something positive and empowering. I’d also like to acknowledge that this attack was mostly planned because of four explicit reasons :
1. I am a woman
2. I am trans
3. I support non-binary people
4. I support intersex people.
I will keep making my comics, no worries. Folks at Facebook are currently making sure this won’t happen again before I can put my page back up. Nothing was lost.
I know many of my readers will be worried. This is my personal profile, also if you can share this as widely as possible so it reaches them, it would be greatly appreciated.
I also set up a Paypal donation email if you want to help with the relocating : sophie@assignedmale.com
Thanks everyone for your support. ❤
President Trump privately advocated for painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located next to the White House, with a “magic paint with silicate." A panel of experts is warning the so-called magic paint could be incompatible with the ornate federal office building's granite exterior.
The No-Bid Contract That Is Turning Washington’s Reflecting Pool Blue – “President Trump handpicked a firm he said had worked on his swimming pool to repair the iconic site near the Lincoln Memorial.”www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/u…
Turns out the House candidate endorsed by @hoyer.house.gov in MD-5 is a lobbyist for Ellison-owned Oracle, and didn’t initially disclose his six figure bonuses for that work. Vote for @libradunn1.bsky.social on June 23rd. wamu.org/story/26/05/…
A federal magistrate questioned how Cole Tomas Allen has been placed in near solitary confinement, with little access to visitors and calls. Judge Zia Faruqui said it was like nothing he’d seen with other defendants, including J6ers with prior offenses accused of political violence.
1. ICE has not paid for detainee medical care for 7 MONTHSThe termination of payments to providers has coincided with a MASSIVE SPIKE in detainee deaths.This is a health crisis and a moral crisis. Follow along for details.🧵
2. On October 3, 2025, the Trump admin stopped paying 3rd parties for medical care for ICE detainees.In November 2025, ICE said the situation was an “absolute emergency” that needed to be fixed “immediately” to “prevent any further… loss of life.”
3. According to the ICE Health Service Corps (IHSC), payments to third parties were supposed to resume on April 30. ICE has contracted with a private firm, Acentra Health, to process reimbursements. But April 30 came and went, and still, nothing is being processed.
4. Meanwhile, detainee deaths at ICE facilities are skyrocketing.From 2018 to 2024, the average number of people who died in ICE custody annually was 8.9. Since ICE stopped medical reimbursements on October 3, 2025, people have been dying in ICE custody at a rate of 51.7 people annually.
5. Beyond the data, there are numerous examples of individual cases that suggest essential medical care is being denied to ICE detainees. Details in today's Popular Information.
⚡️ Update: Zelensky's decree authorizing Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow includes coordinates of Red Square.It remains unclear whether Ukraine intends to carry out strikes elsewhere.
I remember when penny candy went to nickel candy under Pres. Nixon, and applied what we learned in our school “Weekly Readers” to figure that out. Of course there were larger problems. A few years later, my dad lost his business due to general economic woe with high inflation, and I’m pretty sure everyone remembers how personal and smaller business econ went in the 80s. I don’t know why we have to repeat history, when certainly more than a few people can remember this stuff. But, here it is in a concise video. Sharing it would be awesome!
Democratic TN state Rep. Justin Jones burns a Confederate flag in the state Capitol, Thursday, May 8, 2026, video screengrab
Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.
We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”
Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justinsright the fuck back to the Legislature.)
Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.
And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.
And what are people saying about that, and about iconic pictures photographers captured of that? “Hang it in the Louvre.”
Oh, it’s gonna be in museums and history books all right.
Rep. Jones, “Brother Jones” as he refers to himself on Instagram, posted videos and images of the already iconic moment.
The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy.
Today, I left the Capitol Klan Rally, where my white Republican colleagues took off their white hoods and dismantled Black political power in our state. It’s shameful, it’s immoral, and it will go down in the history books alongside the legacy of George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Tennessee has shamefully become the first state to pass a new, racist congressional map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which dismantled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When I walked into the building it was 2026, and when I walked out it was pre-1965. This racial power grab against Black voters is purely rooted in control and elimination of their voices in our democracy. Today’s Jim Crow laws passed in our legislature spit on the graves of our Civil Rights martyrs who bled and died for the right to political power and representation.
They are dragging us backwards in history but we refuse to be moved.
I burned the Confederate flag, because the neo-Confederate caucus that assembled today will be defeated again. Their vision of the South, rooted in plantation politics and racial division will not win. Instead we must use this moment to ignite our rebellion and movement even more towards real justice and multiracial democracy. We must build towards a South that can RISE ANEW.
We will not go back!
“Burn it, young brother,” said Joy-Ann Reid in response. So say we all.
I’d run across this article linked somewhere earlier this past week. But, I couldn’t read it or post it, because it was behind a paywall. Well, thanks to Punctuated.Equilibrium over on MPS Friday night, here it is! Well, a goodly snip of it. Give ’em a click to read it all, because they lifted the paywall so that everyone who wants to know can read it.
During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.
Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.
Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.
I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?
Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.
Let’s start with the cryptocurrency.
Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.
In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio. At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.
But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.
Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.
Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump alsolaunched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype. Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).
Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).
This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos. Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company. Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.
It’s also possible that the two events are related.
The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud. That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.
It’s hard to identify the villain.
Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.
If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams. To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.
The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there. Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016). He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration. Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.
Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.
Sometimes, the favors happen en masse. The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.
I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”
Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.
Doral Trump statue sculptor Alan Cottrill says no other commission has been as chaotic.Golden statue photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images; overlaid photo from Alan Cottrill. New Times photo collage.
Scottie's Playtime 