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Whistleblower Joshua Dean, who raised concerns about Boeing jets, dies at 45

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Whistleblower Joshua Dean, who raised concerns about Boeing jets, dies at 45

Joshua Dean, who died on Tuesday, had gone public with his concerns about defects and quality-control problems at Spirit AeroSystems, a major supplier of parts for Boeing. Here, a Spirit AeroSystems logo is seen on a 737 fuselage sent to Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., in January.

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Joshua Dean, who died on Tuesday, had gone public with his concerns about defects and quality-control problems at Spirit AeroSystems, a major supplier of parts for Boeing. Here, a Spirit AeroSystems logo is seen on a 737 fuselage sent to Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., in January.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at a key Boeing supplier who raised concerns about improperly drilled holes in the fuselage of 737 Max jets, has died.

Dean, 45, died on Tuesday morning, his family announced on social media. His family told NPR on Thursday that Dean had quickly fallen into critical condition after being diagnosed with a MRSA bacterial infection.

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He was airlifted from ​​a hospital in Wichita, Kan., to another facility in Oklahoma City, but medical teams were unable to save his life, according to The Seattle Times, which was the first to report his death.

“He passed away yesterday morning, and his absence will be deeply felt. We will always love you Josh,” Dean’s aunt, Carol Dean Parsons, said via Facebook.

Dean raised quality issues in manufacturing 737 Max

Dean was one of the first to flag potentially dangerous defects with 737 Max jets at Spirit AeroSystems, a major Boeing supplier that was spun off from the planemaker in 2005.

Now federal investigators are looking more closely at Spirit and Boeing to understand what went wrong with the door panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 in midair in January — the latest chapter in a long and troubled relationship between the two companies.

“Our thoughts are with Josh Dean’s family. This sudden loss is stunning news here and for his loved ones,” said Spirit spokesman Joe Buccino in a statement.

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Dean is the second Boeing-related whistleblower to die in the past three months. In March, John Barnett, 62, died in Charleston, S.C., “from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the local coroner said. At the time, Barnett had been testifying in his retaliation lawsuit against Boeing. Police in Charleston say they’re still investigating his death.

Dean and Barnett were both represented by lawyer Brian Knowles.

“Josh’s passing is a loss to the aviation community and the flying public,” Knowles said in a statement. “He possessed tremendous courage to stand up for what he felt was true and right and raised quality and safety issues. Aviation companies should encourage and incentivize those that do raise these concerns.”

Dean rapidly went from healthy to being hospitalized

Dean’s mother and stepfather describe him as a studious and honest man, a “health nut” who rarely drank and attended church regularly. His career was helped by his prodigious memory and attention to detail, they said.

“He was just amazing,” said Winn Weir, Dean’s stepfather. “He could read something and then he could just tell you word for word what he read” days later.

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Dean started feeling sick around two weeks ago, his mother, Virginia Green, told NPR. He stayed home from work for a couple days, but things got worse.

“Sunday [April 21] is when I got a call from him that he was really sick and having trouble breathing,” Green said. “Said he went to an immediate care and they told him he had strep throat.”

Green went to check on her son at his home, telling him to call her if he felt worse.

“He did call me a couple hours later, told me he was in the emergency room,” she said. “And he was scared. They found something on his lungs.”

“He tested positive for influenza B, he tested positive for MRSA. He had pneumonia, his lungs were completely filled up. And from there, he just went downhill.”

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Dean was initially treated at St. Joseph hospital in Wichita. But as he got worse, he was sent to an Integris hospital in Oklahoma City.

It was a stunning turn of events for Dean and his family. Green says he was very healthy — someone who went to the gym, ran nearly every day and was very careful about his diet.

“This was his first time ever in a hospital,” she said. “He didn’t even have a doctor because he never was sick.”

But within days, Dean’s kidneys gave out and he was relying on an ECMO life support machine to do the work of his heart and lungs. The night before Dean died, Green said, the medical staff in Oklahoma did a bronchoscopy on his lungs.

“The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it before in his life. His lungs were just totally … gummed up, and like a mesh over them.”

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Green says she has asked for an autopsy to determine exactly what killed her son. Results will likely take months, she said.

“We’re not sure what he died of,” she said. “We know that he had a bunch of viruses. But you know, we don’t know if somebody did something to him, or did he just get real sick.”

Dean alleged that quality-control systems were flawed

Dean followed his father and grandfather into the commercial aviation industry, holding a series of jobs in the same factory in Wichita where they had both worked before.

After earning a degree in engineering, Dean took his first job at Spirit in 2019. He was let go amid mass layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 but returned to work for the company the next year as a quality auditor.

Dean took that job seriously and grew increasingly frustrated with what he described as a “a culture of not counting defects correctly” at Spirit.

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During two interviews in January, Dean said that Spirit pressured employees not to report defects in order to get planes out of the factory faster.

“Now, I’m not saying they don’t want you to go out there and inspect a job. You know, they do,” Dean told NPR. “But if you make too much trouble, you will get the Josh treatment. You will get what happened to me.”

Dean was fired in April of last year — in retaliation, he said, for flagging improperly drilled holes in fuselages.

“I think they were sending out a message to anybody else,” Dean said. “If you are too loud, we will silence you.”

Gave testimony in a shareholder lawsuit against Spirit

Dean described what he saw while working for Spirit in a deposition for a lawsuit filed by the company’s shareholders, who accuse the company of misleading investors by attempting to conceal “excessive” numbers of defects at the Kansas factory. He was not a plaintiff in the case.

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In the shareholder lawsuit, Dean said he flagged a significant defect — mis-drilled holes in the aft pressure bulkhead of 737 Max fuselages — months before he was fired. His deposition lays out a series of pivotal dates:

October 2022: In his auditor role, Dean realizes Spirit workers mis-drilled holes on the 737 Max aft pressure bulkhead, representing a potential threat to maintaining cabin pressure during flight. The lawsuit accuses the company of concealing the problem.

April 13, 2023: Boeing publicly reveals learning of a separate defect, related to the tail fin fittings on certain 737 Max aircraft. Spirit then confirms that defect.

April 26, 2023: Spirit fires Dean, saying he failed to flag the tail fin issue. In his testimony, Dean said he told company officials that he might have missed the tail fin defect because he had just discovered the problem with bulkheads he inspected and was focused on that.

August 23, 2023: Boeing announces it has found fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead on certain 737 Max airplanes that don’t match its specifications, resulting in “snowmen,” due to the multiple holes’ elongated shape. It’s the problem Dean flagged 10 months earlier. On the same day, Spirit releases a statement acknowledging the issue.

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The shareholder lawsuit accuses Spirit of concealing the bulkhead defect “not only from investors, but also apparently from Boeing.”

A Spirit spokesman says the company strongly disagrees with the lawsuit’s allegations, and it’s fighting the case in court.

Boeing and Spirit look for ways to boost quality

Boeing is currently in talks to acquire Spirit as the planemaker’s leaders concede they may have outsourced too many parts of the manufacturing chain.

“Did it go too far? Yeah, probably did. Now it’s here and now, and now I’ve got to deal with it,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in an interview with CNBC earlier this year.

Boeing agreed last month to advance $425 million to Spirit as it works to improve its manufacturing quality.

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In interviews with NPR, Joshua Dean predicted it would be difficult to replace the experienced workforce that Spirit lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The mechanics aren’t as experienced. Neither are the inspectors,” Dean said. “We’ve just lost that.”

But even after going public with his concerns about Spirit’s quality control, Dean said there were reasons for optimism about the future. And he said that CEO Patrick Shanahan, who took over in late 2023, has a unique opportunity to change Spirit’s culture for the better.

“What you really want is, you want someone to be able to play the hero,” Dean said, saying Shanahan had a chance to play “the new sheriff in town.”

“We need to make sure that there is no retaliation or intimidation,” Dean said. “This culture of you’re too loud, you’ll be moved or silenced — that’s got to go.”

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Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree to Extend Cease-Fire by Three Weeks

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Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree to Extend Cease-Fire by Three Weeks

President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.

A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.

The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.

The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”

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Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”

But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.

In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.

Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.

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Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.

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U.S. soldier charged with suspected Polymarket insider trading over Maduro raid

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U.S. soldier charged with suspected Polymarket insider trading over Maduro raid

Smoke rises from Port of La Guaira in Venezuela on Jan. 3, 2026 after U.S. forces seized the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

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Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed an indictment against a U.S. Army soldier, accusing him of using his insider knowledge of the clandestine military operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January to reap more than $400,000 in profits on the popular prediction market site Polymarket.

The Justice Department says Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, who was stationed at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, was part of the team that planned and carried out the predawn raid in Caracas earlier this year that resulted in the apprehension of Maduro.

The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed the actions against Van Dyke, the first time U.S. officials have leveled criminal charges against someone over prediction market wagers.

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According to the indictment, Van Dyke now faces counts of wire fraud, commodities fraud, misusing non-public government information and other charges.

Trading under numerous usernames including “Burdensome-Mix,” Van Dyke allegedly traded about $32,000 on the arrest of Maduro, resulting in profits exceeding $400,000.

“Prediction markets are not a haven for using misappropriated confidential or classified information for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. “Those entrusted to safeguard our nation’s secrets have a duty to protect them and our armed service members, and not to use that information for personal financial gain.”

Van Dyke’s defense lawyer is not yet publicly known. Polymarket did not return a request for comment.

The charges against Van Dyke come at a sensitive time for the prediction market industry, which has been growing exponentially, despite calls in Washington and among state leaders for the sites to be reined in.

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Van Dyke is the first to be charged in the U.S. for suspected Polymarket insider trading, but Israeli authorities in February arrested several people and charged two on suspicion of using classified information to place bets about military operations in Iran on Polymarket.

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Senate Adopts GOP Budget, Laying the Groundwork to Fund ICE and Reopen DHS

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Senate Adopts GOP Budget, Laying the Groundwork to Fund ICE and Reopen DHS

The Senate early Thursday morning adopted a Republican budget blueprint that would pave the way for a $70 billion increase for immigration enforcement and the eventual reopening of the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans pushed through the plan on a nearly party-line vote of 50 to 48. It came after an overnight marathon of rapid-fire votes, known as a vote-a-rama, in which the G.O.P. beat back a series of Democratic proposals aimed at addressing the high cost of health care, housing, food and energy. The debate put the two parties’ dueling messages on vivid display six months before the midterm elections.

Republicans, who are using the budget plan to lay the groundwork to eventually push through a filibuster-proof bill providing a multiyear funding stream for President Trump’s immigration crackdown, used the all-night session to highlight their hard-line stance on border security, seeking to portray Democrats as unwilling to safeguard the country.

Democrats tried and failed to add a series of changes aimed at addressing cost-of-living issues, seizing the opportunity to hammer Republicans as out of touch with and unwilling to act on the concerns of everyday Americans.

Here’s what to know about the budget plan and the nocturnal ritual senators engaged in before adopting it.

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The budget blueprint is a crucial piece of Republicans’ plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security and end a shutdown that has lasted for more than two months. After Democrats refused to fund immigration enforcement without new restrictions on agents’ tactics and conduct, the G.O.P. struck a deal with them to pass a spending bill that would fund everything but ICE and the Border Patrol. Republicans said they would fund those agencies through a special budget bill that Democrats could not block.

“We can fix this with Republican votes, and we will,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the Budget Committee chairman. “Every Democrat has opposed money for the Border Patrol and ICE at a time of great peril.”

In resorting to a new budget blueprint, Republicans laid the groundwork to deny Democrats a chance to stop the immigration enforcement funding. But they also submitted themselves to a vote-a-rama, in which any senator can propose unlimited changes to such a measure before it is adopted.

The budget measure now goes to the House, which must adopt it before lawmakers in both chambers can draft the legislation funding immigration enforcement. That bill will provide yet another opportunity for a vote-a-rama even closer to the November election.

Democrats took to the floor to criticize Republicans for supercharging funding for federal immigration enforcement rather than moving legislation that would address Americans’ concerns over affordability.

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“This is what Republicans are fighting for,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Democratic leader. “To maintain two unchecked rogue agencies that are dreaded in all corners of this country instead of reducing your health care costs, your housing costs, your grocery costs, your gas costs.”

Democrats offered a host of amendments along those lines, all of which were defeated by Republicans — and that was the point. The proposals were meant to put the G.O.P. in a tough political spot, showcasing their opposition to helping Americans afford high living costs. Fewer than a handful of G.O.P. senators crossed party lines to support them.

The G.O.P. thwarted an effort by Mr. Schumer to require that the budget measure lower out-of-pocket health care costs for Americans. Two Republicans who are up for re-election this year, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted with Democrats, but the proposal was still defeated.

Republicans also squelched a move by Senator Ben Ray Lujan, Democrat of New Mexico, to create a fund that would lower grocery costs and reverse cuts to food aid programs that Republicans enacted last year. Ms. Collins and Mr. Sullivan again joined Democrats.

Also defeated by the G.O.P.: a proposal by Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, to address rising consumer prices brought on by Mr. Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran; one by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, to require the budget measure to address rising electricity prices, and another by Mr. Markey to create a fund to bring down housing costs.

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Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who is up for re-election in Georgia, also sought to add language requiring the budget plan to address health insurance companies denying or delaying access to care, but that, too was blocked by Republicans.

While Republicans had fewer proposals for changes to their own budget plan, they also sought to offer measures that would underscore their aggressive stance on immigration enforcement and dare Democrats to vote against them.

Mr. Graham offered an amendment to allocate funds toward a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to the apprehension and deportation of adult immigrants convicted of rape, murder, or sexual abuse of a minor after illegally entering the United States. It passed unanimously.

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, sought to bar Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion and other services, and criticized the organization for providing transgender care to minors. Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, also attempted to tack on the G.O.P. voter identification bill, known as the SAVE America Act. Both proposals were blocked when Democrats, joined by a few Republicans, voted to strike them as unrelated to the budget plan.

The Republicans who crossed party lines to oppose their own party’s proposals for new voting requirements were Ms. Collins along with Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

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Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski also opposed the effort to block payments to Planned Parenthood.

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