BARCELONA : Lewis Hamilton said he has a great relationship with Ferrari race engineer Riccardo Adami and continuing speculation about friction between them is just noise.

Terse radio exchanges at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, Hamilton’s race debut in the Italian Formula One team’s red overalls, raised questions in March and they resurfaced in Monaco last Sunday.

Then the seven-times world champion was heard asking Adami over the team radio “are you upset with me?” after the Italian did not respond to earlier messages.

Ferrari explained that silence as being due to radio and signal problems in a race that features cars speeding through a tunnel.

“It was literally just there were areas where we had radio problems through the race, and I did not get information that I wanted. We spoke afterwards,” Hamilton told reporters at the Spanish Grand Prix on Thursday when asked for clarification.

“There is a lot of speculation and most of it is BS. We have a great relationship. He is amazing to work with. He is a great guy, working so hard, we both are,” added the Briton, who joined from Mercedes in January.

“We don’t always get it right every weekend. Do we have disagreements? Yes, like everyone does in relationships. But we work through them. We are both in it together.

“We both want to win a world championship together and we are both working towards lifting the team up. So it is just all noise and we are not paying attention to it. It doesn’t make a difference to the job we are trying to do.”

Hamilton said he and Adami, who previously worked with four-times world champion Sebastian Vettel and Spaniard Carlos Sainz, were learning more and more about each other and adapting the way they worked.

“He has worked with lots of different drivers before. We don’t have any problems whatsoever,” said Hamilton, who won a sprint race in Shanghai but is otherwise yet to stand on a podium for Ferrari.

The Briton finished fifth in Monaco, with teammate Charles Leclerc second in his home race.

Hamilton’s radio comments also put him in the spotlight in Miami when he suggested sarcastically that the team “have a tea-break while you’re at it” as he waited for a strategy call.

The United States government has collected DNA samples from upwards of 133,000 migrant children and teenagers—including at least one 4-year-old—and uploaded their genetic data into a national criminal database used by local, state, and federal law enforcement, according to documents reviewed by WIRED.

The records, quietly released by the US Customs and Border Protection earlier this year, offer the most detailed look to date at the scale of CBP’s controversial DNA collection program. They reveal for the first time just how deeply the government’s biometric surveillance reaches into the lives of migrant children, some of whom may still be learning to read or tie their shoes—yet whose DNA is now stored in a system originally built for convicted sex offenders and violent criminals.

The Department of Justice has argued that extensive DNA collection activity at the border provides “an assessment of the danger” a migrant potentially “poses to the public” and will essentially help solve crimes that may be committed in the future. Experts say that the children’s raw genetic material will be stored indefinitely and worry that, without proper guardrails, the DNA dragnet could eventually be used for more extensive profiling.

Spanning from October 2020 through the end of 2024, the records show that CBP swabbed the cheeks of between 829,000 and 2.8 million people, with experts estimating that the true figure, excluding duplicates, is likely well over 1.5 million. That number includes as many as 133,539 children and teenagers. These figures mark a sweeping expansion of biometric surveillance—one that explicitly targets migrant populations, including children.

The DNA samples are registered in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a database administered by the FBI, which processes the DNA and stores the resulting genetic profiles. A network of criminal forensic databases, CODIS is used by local, state, and federal enforcement agencies to match DNA collected from crime scenes or convictions to identify suspects.

On May 10, 2024, for instance, records say that CBP agents from the El Paso, Texas, field office collected a DNA sample from the mouth of an individual in its custody whom CBP identified as Cuban and who was detained for allegedly being an “immigrant w/o docs.” Swabbing the individuals’ cheek, the agents obtained a DNA sample containing the individual’s entire genetic code and then sent the sample to the FBI for processing.

According to CBP records, the individual was just 4 years old.

Of the tens of thousands of minors whose DNA was collected by Customs and Border Protection over the past four years, as many as 227 were 13 or younger, including the 4-year-old. Department of Homeland Security policy states that individuals under 14 are generally exempt from DNA collection, but field officers have the discretion to collect DNA in some circumstances. The data shows additional entries for kids aged 10, 11, 12, and 13. The numbers spike beginning at age 14; more than 30,000 entries were logged for each age group from 14 to 17.

Under current rules, DNA is generally collected from anyone who is also fingerprinted. According to DHS policy, 14 is the minimum age at which fingerprinting becomes routine.

As many as 122 minors were categorized as American citizens, 53 of whom were not detained for any criminal arrest, CBP records say. (People asking to enter the United States to apply for asylum are put in civil rather than criminal custody.)

Neither DHS nor CBP provided comment ahead of publication.

Any forward pivot in American politics usually involves a fretful look backward, and as the Trumpian GOP sizes up prospects for the 2026 midterms, a new breakdown of the failures of the Democratic Party over the 2024 election cycle has materialized. On Monday, the Democratic polling group Catalist released its in-depth analysis of the 2024 debacle—the most detailed such postmortem to date. The top-line message of the report can be summed up as follows: massive system failure.

Democrats underperformed compared to the 2020 cycle in nearly every significant battleground, and within almost all relevant demographic groups, Catalist finds. Overall turnout was remarkably high, with 64 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. In most postwar election cycles, high turnout has been an advantage for Democratic tickets, but the Harris-Walz campaign consistently lost footing among almost all electoral subgroups. In the biggest such group—return voters from the prior cycle—Harris’s support dropped two points from Biden’s showing in 2020. And the bad news keeps coming as you drill down. Harris-Walz lost support among all voters of color, with Latino males dropping below 50 percent support for a Democratic ticket for the first time, and saw already worrisome gender gaps worsen within voters of color.

Also, new voters broke against the Democratic Party for the first time within Catalist’s data research. Thirty million general election voters from 2020 didn’t return to the ballot box in 2024—the largest such figure in elections conducted in the 21st century. Swing voters—here termed “irregular” voters—also broke against the Democratic ticket, resulting in the Trump-Vance ticket sweeping the seven battleground states of the 2024 balloting. The Democrats’ losses among non-college-educated voters—the marquee shift in electoral politics since Trump’s first election victory in 2016—continues, but the party also saw national support among college-educated voters dip by three points, from 59 percent to 56 percent, between 2020 and 2024.

If you pan further back to 2012—the last time Democrats spoke confidently of holding down a winning national coalition—the numbers are still more sobering. Democratic poll analyst Ruy Teixera, who coauthored the hopium-laden tract The Emerging New Democratic Majority back in 2004, recently surveyed the collapse of that now-remote electoral mirage for his newsletter The Democratic Strategist. Among non-white working-class (i.e., non-college-educated) voters, he writes, “Obama cleaned up…carrying them by 64 points in 2012. In the 2024 election the margin was down to 32 points, exactly cutting the 2012 Democratic advantage in half.” The Hispanic share of the non-college-educated demographic saw the steepest drop-off, with a whopping 38-point Obama advantage in 2012 shrinking to just a six-point pro-Harris margin in 2024. Disparate gender support for Democrats also shows a party in troubling decline; Obama lost the 2012 male vote by five points, while Harris’s male deficit was more than triple that, at 16 points. What’s more, Texiera notes, the Democratic advantage across those two cycles was virtually constant—which means that the overall 11-point shift in the gender gap from 16 to 27 points “is entirely attributable to Democrats doing worse among men, not to doing better among women.” [Emphasis in original]

The comprehensive breakdown furnished by Catalist confirms what’s already painfully obvious to anyone following the recent misfortunes of the Democratic Party: Its woes won’t be remedied by any readily tweaked flaw in party messaging, or a canny nudge toward a newly Democratic-leaning demographic grouping or economic region. No, the party is in the midst of a massive credibility crisis with the American electorate, with key groups once tagged as mainstays of a future Democratic governing coalition defecting in significant numbers.

Of course, the GOP isn’t really presiding over a stalwart majority-in-the-making, either; as the Catalist report notes, the party’s signature gains in the 2024 cycle, among 18-to-29-year-old men, and with Latino and Black men, may include voters who aren’t likely to become regular GOP supporters over the long term. In targeting “low-propensity” voters, Trump’s election team marshaled its first national majority, but this bedrock group by definition is prone to either suspend or switch its political allegiances under shifting economic and cultural conditions. Yet, in spite of ongoing GOP electoral vulnerabilities, there’s no question that Democrats are at an ongoing loss to produce an effective counter-mobilizing strategy to reverse its own flagging prospects. The case to preserve the institutional safeguards of American democracy against attack from an authoritarian MAGA movement has largely fallen flat—as did the multifront criminal prosecution of Trump, as well as the effort to publicize the Project 2025 agenda, and any number of hastily focus-grouped mass appeals.

At the same time, however, the data analysis of a lapsed election only adds up to an incomplete account of the conduct of national politics, which after all concerns both the crafting of narratives and campaigns of mass persuasion. That’s why, at the end of its glum roll call of voting reversals, the Catalist team writes that “for Democrats to secure a victory, they need to simultaneously (1) convince a portion of relatively high turnout ‘swing voters’ to vote for them, while (2) refreshing their pool of rotating voters who tend to lean Democratic but who have inconsistent participation in elections.”

To get a broader sense of fresh political opportunities beckoning to Democratic leaders and candidates, you can toggle over to a new Axios report on how the Trump-led GOP is already trying to fend off losses in the crucial 2026 midterms. Trump’s pet super PAC, Securing American Greatness, is already unloosing its multimillion-dollar war chest on ads touting the president’s economic agenda in the districts of eight vulnerable House GOP incumbents, while short-circuiting threatened primary challenges to similarly situated Republican lawmakers. And Trump is motivated by something more than simple solicitude for his party’s narrow eight-vote House majority. As a veteran of two prior impeachments, Trump “knows the stakes firsthand,” said former GOP campaign official Matt Gorman. “Investigations, impeachment—he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”

It’s a good rule of thumb, when a political opponent is moving preemptively to close off a source of narrative-shaping political power, to correspondingly step up your own efforts in the same direction. Yet Democratic leaders on the Hill have instead moved with efficient dispatch to tamp down the impeachment resolutions offered by Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar, and to sideline one of Thanedar’s more powerful allies, Texas Representative Al Green. And while the party has floated many outraged statements about the brazen corruption sanctioned under Trump’s second term, in such things as his sweetheart deals for Elon Musk and the $400 million gift of a new Air Force One plane from Qatar, Senate Democrats buckled in support of the crypto industry’s GENIUS Act—thereby fortifying one of Trump’s own prime tributaries of untrammeled corruption. Given the far from unrelated collapse of congressional Democrats before the xenophobic and demagogic Laken Riley Act—and given Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s ignominious surrender during government shutdown negotiations—Democrats are already signaling an acute aversion to exercising the limited power they now have in the face of an authoritarian regime. Is it any wonder that voters across the board regard Democrats as unserious prosecutors of the public interest?

The same criticism holds in the crucial matters of income inequality and political economy, which a corporate-compromised Harris campaign was unable to synthesize into an effective message of left populism. Now that Republicans have enacted, via their signature tax-cut and immigration-police-state bill, the single greatest upward distribution of wealth brought about by any piece of legislation in American history, a serious economic populist platform isn’t something that the party’s policy braintrust can continue to avoid. Indeed, the critical anchor of that 2012 Obama campaign was Obama’s own decision, against the counsel of his chief campaign adviser, David Axelrod, to bail out the then-flailing US auto industry. That decision furnished the basis of the “blue firewall” of upper Midwestern states that secured Obama’s reelection—and Hilllary Clinton’s wanton disregard of that same firewall helped seal her electoral doom four years later.

Right now, the party’s economic populist flank, like the cause of Trump’s impeachment, has been taken up by insurgent figures—chiefly Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’ve been conducting a series of barnstorming rallies against the American oligarchy that are bringing in enormous crowds in many red-state locations. But party leaders typically can’t be counted on to turn out for the same organizing opportunities—and members of the Democrats’ overpaid and indolent consulting class have gone to the trouble of publicly whingeing against the term “oligarchy” as somehow too recondite for the working-class base that they’ve been systematically alienating since 2012. In other words, Democrats continue, against all the evidence given to them by a restive anti-status quo electorate, to position themselves as the sclerotic and hidebound defenders of the status quo. And this system-wide resistance to change is continuing heedlessly on track to the next total system failure.