It was a normal, quiet day in a Las Vegas neighborhood when a house cleaner named Kelly found lab equipment and vials of unknown liquid in a garage that’s usually locked. Five days later, she became deathly ill. What was found in the home on Sugar Springs Drive, and what are the connections to the lab that contained thousands of biological samples in a warehouse discovered in a small California city? The samples were found labeled as HIV, malaria, and Ebola. This Epoch Times original documentary explores these questions and the Chinese national connected to both labs. THE 2ND LAB premieres on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 6 p.m. ET. 👇 theepochtim.es/kd9usp

Children have always played. Across cultures and generations, certain kinds of toys are constants: blocks, dolls, and puzzles that invite children to build, pretend, and experiment. That is no accident. Toys engage many of the ways the human brain learns. “You're active, you're engaged, you make it meaningful—not by someone else's design, but by your agency,” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor and director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Epoch Times. Toys that once occupied children's attention now have a powerful competitor: the screen. Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” portrays that competition playing out inside the toy box. But the deeper concern is what skills children miss out on developing when screens displace hands-on play with toys. “I started working with patients back in the [mid-1990s],” Sandra Whitehouse, a veteran child psychologist and associate director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, told The Epoch Times. “That was really pre-iPhone, pre-screens, and I've seen a real change.” The difference became particularly striking after the COVID-19 pandemic; she saw children whose social and communication skills seemed different from those she had seen earlier in her career. “Some had missed opportunities for play during important developmental periods,” she said. What Whitehouse has watched unfold over three decades is something that developmental scientists have spent decades exploring: the invisible work of toys. Read more—link in 🧵

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has blocked Republicans from using Missouri’s new House map in November. The justices on Sept. 25 rejected a bid to put the 2025 congressional lines on the Nov. 3 midterm ballot—the same map used in the Aug. 4 primaries. They instead allowed the 2022 map, which gives Republicans a 6–2 edge over Democrats. The 2025 map would have made that 7–1.

A federal appeals court agreed with the Department of War (DoW) that an AI giant doesn’t get to set the rules for war. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Sept. 25, 2026, upheld the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, rejecting the company’s claim that the label exceeded the law and punished protected speech. The 2–1 ruling lets the DoW keep the Claude AI product off military systems and contractor networks. The break came after Anthropic refused to drop contractual limits it wanted on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon has said it does not plan to use Claude for those purposes. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth invoked Section 4713 of Title 41 of the U.S. Code on March 3, after concluding that continued use of Claude in department systems—already using the model since 2024—posed a national-security supply-chain risk.