On a late July morning, the sun is already broiling the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The air is so humid, even a loose shirt quickly turns into a sticky mess.

Later, the heat index will top out around 103 degrees, turning the walk between air-conditioned museums into a scorching trek. I’m on my bike, in the hottest part of the summer tourist season, on a mission: to find visitors who are trying to beat the heat with an odd-looking gadget that’s gained in popularity in recent years. It doesn’t take long.

“These are amazing,” says Christa Seger, who sits with three of her kids in the shade near the Washington Monument.

She holds up a cooling neck fan. It looks like a space-age horseshoe, but resting on your neck, it uses dozens of vents to blow air toward your ears and head. Some models — like Seger’s — also have metal panels, to help dissipate heat.

“I can’t believe how cold they get,” says Seger, who’s visiting from Denver.

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Christa Seger holds one of the two portable neck fans she has with her on a hot morning in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Seger is visiting the National Mall from Denver with her family.

Seger bought two fans for about $25 each a few days ago, back in Colorado.

“They last somewhere between 4 to 6 hours on a full charge,” she says. Thinking the fans might help her daughter as they march from Smithsonian museums to historic buildings — and the occasional ice cream truck — she brought a battery pack to keep the fans juiced up.

“She loved it yesterday. It really helped her,” Seger says.

Some of these fans can cost hundreds of dollars. But I’m trying out a very basic model today. As it powers on, air starts whooshing past my ears and neck. It feels like a nice breeze. But is it really doing anything to cool me?

How the neck fans work

Consider the main strategy our bodies use to cool down: sweating.

“The heat of vaporization gets pulled from that sweat into the atmosphere,” says Dr. Adam Watkins of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. “So you actually are losing heat that way.”

But that’s not always enough. Watkins says the emergency room where he works is seeing 25% more heat exposure cases this summer than last year — a trend he says has been rising over the past decade.

Intense heat waves are one reason why people might look to a personal cooling fan. But there are limits to how well they can work.

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Visitors to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., arrive in the early morning on a day when temperatures would rise to well over 90 degrees — and a heat index of 103.

“The biggest thing is being able to evaporate the sweat off your body,” says Cecilia Kaufman, director of occupational safety for the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut.

In theory, a fan can boost your body’s evaporative cooling process by speeding the flow of air over your skin.

“The problem is when it’s hot and humid, the sweat does not evaporate as quickly off your skin,” Kaufman says. “So that takes away your body’s ability to really cool.”

Surface area is key to effective cooling

For evaporation to work well, it helps to expose lots of skin.

“The best way to cool down would be basically to take all your clothes off, expose the entire body to the air and let all of the sweat evaporate,” says Chris Tyler, a researcher in environmental physiology at the University of Roehampton in London. “But you’d get arrested,” he adds with a laugh, “so that’s not a recommendation.”

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Bella Cabassa, 8, and her brother Shaun, 10, use paper parasols to block the sun — and to fan themselves — in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The Cabassa family was visiting the capital from Pennsylvania.

In contrast, a neck fan can only affect a small part of your body. It might feel nice to use one, even if it’s blowing humid air. In part, that’s because there are a lot of thermal receptors on the face and neck, making them very sensitive to heat.

In general, we shouldn’t view these neck fans as a type of treatment, Tyler says.

“It’s a bit like playing sport with a painkilling injection,” he says. “The issue is still there. It’s just that you can’t detect it for a little bit.”

As a result, Tyler and Kaufman say, the small fans likely do more to make us feel cooler rather than actually lowering our body temperature — which could raise the risk of someone over-exerting themselves without realizing how the heat is affecting them.

But they also note that research is ongoing into improving ways of cooling the head and neck, as well as using cooling garments like hats and neck gaiters in hot environments.

Taking a neck fan for a test whirl

Down at the National Mall, I’m a bit skeptical when I first put my fan on. After all, the midday air is still and scorching. The flags that ring the Washington Monument’s base are drooping and listless. (I feel you, flags.)

But as it starts to blow air on my ears and head, this little doodad does seem to make my time riding and walking a bit more bearable. I’m aware that I might look like an extra from a low-budget sci-fi movie with this thick, plastic device looped around my neck. But it doesn’t feel too heavy or obstructive. And while I don’t have long hair (or, let’s be real, much hair of any type), it’s worth noting that many of the fans are bladeless, so they’re less likely to get entangled.

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Marnisha Mintlow, visiting from Los Angeles, wears a portable neck fan outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Tuesday. “It is too hot!” Mintlow said. “With the increasing heat, the neck fan keeps me cool and my hands free.”

I roll down past the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial. Along the way, I notice that when the neck fan is set to maximum power, the sound of the motor can be a distraction. At the bottom of the memorial steps, I run into Jeffrey Pagulong, who’s visiting from Boston. He and his son Christof, 12, both wear neck fans.

“It’s really hot,” Pagulong says, standing in the blazing sun. “And wearing this fan kind of helps a lot, it cools down your head, so it helps” to ease the heat from walking, he adds.

I ask if the sound bothers him.

“The noise is OK. You can hear the fan, but it’s fine. The noise is much better than the heat, you know? I can take the noise, but not the heat.”

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Galilee Maldonado, 16, holds a paper parasol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Maldonado said she felt that the D.C. summer heat is hotter than Texas, where she’s from.

In my informal survey of the Mall, I spot more people using old-fashioned parasols than newfangled fans. It turns out a street vendor has been doing brisk business, selling yellow and red umbrellas for $10. One customer was Galilee Maldonado, 16, visiting from Texas.

“I bought it yesterday from a lady, but I really liked it,” she says.

Like a neck fan, the parasol might not do much to lower her core temperature. But it’s making Maldonado, who says she was surprised by the heat in Washington, feel better.

“It’s helping me cope with this weather,” she says.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Donald Trump is working on a plan to “get people fed” in Gaza after he sent his special envoy to the war-battered enclave to visit controversial aid distribution sites.

Steve Witkoff, accompanied by Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador for Israel, spent five hours touring a US-backed aid operation in the ruins of the southern city of Rafah that has been linked to hundreds of deaths.

Mr Witkoff, the first senior official to visit Gaza since the war began, said what he learnt would help Washington “craft a plan” to get more food and aid to Palestinians.

Mr Trump has become increasingly concerned by reports of widespread starvation in the Strip and has in recent days pushed for more aid to reach Gazans.

“We want to help people. We want to help them live. We want to get people fed. It is something that should have happened [a] long time ago,” Mr Trump told the Axios news website on Friday.

‘Regular bloodbaths’

The site the two officials toured is one of only four in Gaza which are run by the highly controversial Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which aid agencies say is responsible for contributing to the hunger crisis across the territory.

More than 1,300 people seeking aid in Gaza have been killed since GHF took over aid operations in late May, according to the UN, most of them shot by Israeli forces “in the vicinity” of the aid hubs.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israeli forces of presiding over “regular bloodbaths” close to the US-backed aid points.

The GHF says nobody has been killed at its distribution points, and it is doing a better job of protecting aid deliveries than the UN.

Mr Huckabee praised the private aid operation, which relies on protection from IS contractors and the Israeli army. In a post on X, he said he learnt “the truth” of what was happening, saying the GHF carries out an “incredible feat” by delivering more than “one million meals a day”.

Coinciding with the diplomats’ visit, Human Rights Watch condemned GHF’s aid sites as a “death trap” and accused Israeli forces of using starvation as a weapon of war.

The US president has not yet shared details on the new aid plan he is working on. It is not clear if it will involve more support for the GHF or for other aid mechanisms.

In a quickly deleted tweet after the visit, Mr Huckabee claimed Gazans “love” Mr Trump and “believe he is helping”.

Mr Huckabee, appointed by Mr Trump in February, is a controversial figure who is heavily opposed to the two-state solution and a staunch advocate of Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

However, hours after their visit, Palestinian medics said Israeli forces shot dead three Palestinians near one of GHF’s sites in Rafah. It is not yet clear if it was the same hub the officials visited.

Mr Witkoff made his visit to Gaza a day after arriving in Israel to push for fresh ceasefire negotiations, as Israel is under mounting international pressure over the destruction of Gaza and growing starvation among its 2.2 million inhabitants.

Medics also said at least 12 other Palestinians were killed in air strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday.

It comes as France and Germany carried out airdrops over Gaza. Emmanuel Macron, posting footage of the operation, however cautioned that it was still “not enough” as he pushed Israel to allow full humanitarian access.

Israel also began food air drops this week, but UN agencies say it is a poor alternative for allowing trucks into the enclave, which carry twice as much as planes.

The worsening humanitarian crisis has prompted France, Britain and Canada to pledge to recognise a Palestinian state, a move already taken by most countries but not by major Western powers.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced earlier this week that the UK government will recognise Palestinian statehood unless Israel takes “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza”. Following his comments, the US and Israel accused Sir Keir of rewarding the Hamas terrorist group.

Alexander Stubb, Finland’s president, on Friday also said he is ready to approve a recognition of Palestinian statehood if the government moves forward with such a proposal.

Meanwhile, France plans to suspend its programme to evacuate Gazans pending a probe into how a student accused of sharing anti-semetic posts was allowed into the country.

France has helped more than 500 people leave Gaza since the war began, mostly including wounded children, journalists, students and artists.

“No evacuation of any kind will take place until we have drawn conclusions from this investigation,” Jean-Noel Barrot, France’s foreign minister, told Franceinfo radio, adding that all Gazans who have entered France will now undergo a second screening.

International experts warned this week that a “worst-case scenario of famine” is playing out in Gaza.

Israel’s near 22-month military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2.0 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to safely deliver food to starving people.

Envoy Steve Witkoff and the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, toured a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution site in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has been almost completely destroyed and is now a largely depopulated Israeli military zone.

Steve Witkoff, centre, and Mike Huckabee, centre left, visiting a food distribution site in Gaza City (David Azaguri/US Embassy Jerusalem via AP)

Hundreds of people have been killed by Israeli fire while heading to such aid sites since May, according to witnesses, health officials and the UN human rights office.

Israel and GHF say they have only fired warning shots and that the toll has been exaggerated.

In a report issued on Friday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said GHF was at the heart of a “flawed, militarised aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”

Mr Witkoff posted on X that he had spent more than five hours inside Gaza in order to gain “a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza”.

Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

Chapin Fay, a spokesperson for GHF, said the visit reflected Mr Trump’s understanding of the stakes and that “feeding civilians, not Hamas, must be the priority”.

The group said it has delivered over 100 million meals since it began operations in May.

All four of the group’s sites established in May are in zones controlled by the Israeli military and have become flashpoints of desperation, with starving people scrambling for scarce aid.

More 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire since May while seeking aid in the territory, most near the GHF sites but also near United Nations aid convoys, the UN human rights office said last month.

The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots at people who approach its forces, and GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding.

Officials at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza said on Friday they received the bodies of 13 people who were killed while trying to get aid, including near the site that US officials visited.

GHF denied anyone was killed at their sites on Friday and said most recent shootings had occurred near UN aid convoys.

Mr Witkoff’s visit comes a week after US officials walked away from ceasefire talks in Qatar, blaming Hamas and pledging to seek other ways to rescue Israeli hostages and make Gaza safe.

Mr Trump wrote on social media that the fastest way to end the crisis would be for Hamas to surrender and release hostages.

The war was triggered when Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on October 7 2023 and abducted 251 others.

They still hold 50 hostages, including about 20 believed to be alive. Most of the others have been released in ceasefires or other deals.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Its count does not distinguish between militants and civilians. The ministry operates under the Hamas government. The UN and other international organisations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.

U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff arrived in the southern Gazan city of Rafah Friday, where he inspected an aid distribution center operated by the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Witkoff was accompanied by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who posted about the visit on X , saying they had gone to Gaza to “learn the truth” about the aid site, adding: “GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!”

But the international community has criticized the food aid system vociferously, saying people in Gaza are starving and have been shot trying to get food.

Witkoff and Huckabee would brief President Trump “immediately after their visit to approve a final plan for food and aid distribution into the region,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and further details on future food distribution mechanisms would be published “once that plan is approved and agreed on” by the president.

Witkoff landed in Israel earlier this week to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as U.N.-backed food security experts reported that a famine was now unfolding in Gaza thanks in part to Israeli restrictions on aid entering the territory.

At the same time other world leaders have called on Israeli authorities to allow unrestricted aid flows to prevent further civilian deaths. Not only are daily deaths linked to starvation continuing in Gaza, say local medics and international aid groups, but the U.N. reported that since May more than 800 people have been killed while trying to access food from distribution sites run by the GHF.

FILE – President-elect Donald Trump listens to Steve Witkoff speak during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Jan. 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. Evan Vucci / AP AP

Hamas-run health authorities in the Palestinian territory said Thursday that at least 91 Palestinians had been killed, and around 600 wounded, while attempting to access food and aid over just the past 24 hours. On Friday morning, even more Palestinians came under fire from Israeli troops at one site managed by the GHF, according to NPR News local producer in Gaza, Anas Babar.

The GHF was established to bypass the United Nations, and Israel has insisted on its continued operation, blaming Hamas for the violence that has often surrounded the group’s sites.

But its stance on food aid restrictions has prompted France, the U.K. and Canada to announce plans to recognize a Palestinian state, with Britain saying this would happen in September unless Israel changes course. It’s something Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, insisted at a press conference this week would leave Hamas in power, and “ain’t gonna happen.”

The U.S. State Department has said it will impose visa-related sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, headquartered in the West Bank, due to its support for cases against Israel tied to the Gaza conflict that are being heard at international courts.

The Palestinian Authority has been pushing for greater international recognition of Palestinian statehood, as a pathway to a future two-state solution involving Israelis and Palestinians.

The escalating global and domestic outrage over Israel’s policies regarding food shortages in Gaza has extended to several other European countries, and even to the U.S. Senate, where a majority of Democrats this week voted to block sales of specific American weapons to Israel.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israeli troops that maintain a security presence near the handful of GHF sites in Gaza of carrying out war crimes during their actions against Palestinian aid seekers. NPR cannot confirm this report by HRW.

The rights group’s report, published Friday , said the “dire humanitarian situation is a direct result of Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war—a war crime—as well as Israel’s continued intentional deprivation of aid and basic services, which amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination, and acts of genocide.”

Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at HRW, said in the report that “Israeli forces are not only deliberately starving Palestinian civilians, but they are now gunning them down almost every day as they desperately seek food for their families.”

Palestinians mourn a man killed while trying to reach aid trucks entering northern Gaza through the Zikim crossing with Israel, at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Thursday, July 31, 2025. Jehad Alshrafi / AP AP

The aid system put in place by contractors at the GHF, backed by the U.S., was “flawed” and “militarized,” Wille said, and had “turned aid distributions into regular bloodbath.”

President Donald Trump said he hopes Israel will ensure the delivery of food to starving Palestinians and prevent aid diversion by Hamas.

In an interview with NBC, Trump described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a competent person” and said his administration wanted “to make sure people get fed.” He emphasized that “good management” would prevent the theft of aid, adding, “Hopefully, the Israelis will provide that.”

When questioned by reporters about Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza this week as genocide, Trump responded, “It’s terrible what’s occurring there. It’s a terrible thing. People are very hungry.”

He reiterated his claim that the U.S. had provided millions in aid to the GHF, but questions its efficacy.

“It’s a shame because I don’t see the results of it. We gave it to people who, in theory, are watching over it fairly closely. We wanted Israel to watch over it. Part of the problem is that Hamas is taking the money and they’re taking the food,” Trump said.

Emily Feng in Tel Aviv and Anas Baba in Gaza contributed reporting.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Updated August 1, 2025 at 9:41 AM MDT

Stock markets fell sharply on Friday, as U.S. unemployment rose and President Trump unveiled steep tariffs on a wide range of countries.

Trump’s latest tariffs, announced late Thursday, are reigniting concerns about how these import taxes would impact the U.S. and the global economies.

On Friday morning, a weaker-than-expected jobs report amplified investors’ fears about the consequences: Employers created only 73,000 jobs in July, fewer than the around 100,000 jobs economists had expected. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 550 points, or about 1.3%, in morning trading. The S&P 500, which tracks the largest U.S. companies, fell about 1.5%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped about 2%.

A busy week of economic data

The latest tariffs announcement and the weak jobs report come at the end of a busy economic news week. Investors have been parsing the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady. They’ve also been watching the earnings reports of the largest U.S. companies, which have been updating investors on how tariffs are affecting their abilities to make money.

The broad sell-off on Friday marks an abrupt reversal from Wall Street’s optimism this summer. Markets went into a tailspin in April when Trump first unveiled his tariffs, before he started pausing and softening some of those tax rates.

Since then, global investors have largely been shrugging off his updated plans. But on Friday, their worries came roaring back, amplified by the new evidence that these tariffs are affecting the jobs market.

The jobs weakness is likely to increase calls for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates when it next meets in September. The central bank held rates steady earlier this week, out of concern that rising tariffs would put more upward pressure on prices.

“The cracks in the labor market have widened substantially and add further pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates,” Nationwide Chief Economist Kathy Bostjancic wrote on Friday morning.

Copyright 2025 NPR