The State Department's Level 3 advisory warns of terrorism and unrest in Israel, with some areas near Gaza carrying a Level 4 "Do Not Travel" warning.
Page A10From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Americans warned against travel over terrorism threats as Ivanka Trump takes a surfing lesson in Costa Rica.
As it ran on the front
Two stories ran the same week and nobody had to embellish either one to make them sit next to each other funny. The first: American travelers got a formal warning to reconsider their plans because a popular destination is facing an active terrorism threat. That's a real advisory, the kind that changes what regular families do with their one vacation week a year — cancel the trip, eat the deposit, stay home. The second: Ivanka Trump took a surfing lesson in Costa Rica, on what the coverage itself calls her family's latest beach vacation getaway, the word 'latest' doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence.
Nobody's saying Costa Rica is the flagged destination. That's not the point, and the con doesn't need it to be. The point is who gets to treat travel like a leisure decision and who has to treat it like a risk calculation, and that split runs almost exactly along the line you'd guess. A family making minimum wage and a family with Secret Service detail are reading two different kinds of news that week. One reads a threat advisory and cancels a trip they saved a year for. The other reads nothing, because nothing in their week requires reading a threat advisory — someone else's job is to read it for them, plan around it, and keep the beach vacation on schedule.…
…(cont) This isn't a story about hypocrisy, because hypocrisy would require the two people to be making the same choice under the same conditions and choosing differently. They're not under the same conditions. That's the actual story. Security, information, and the plain physical freedom to get on a plane without checking a State Department advisory first are distributed like everything else in this country — unevenly, quietly, and in a way that never shows up on anybody's tax return. The travel warning is real. The surfing lesson is real. Put them next to each other and you don't get a scandal, you get a floor plan of who this economy actually protects, and it isn't the family that ate the deposit.
“One warning tells regular people to cancel the trip they saved all year for; the other family's on a beach in Costa Rica taking surf lessons the same week — that's not a coincidence, that's just who gets to read a State Department advisory and who gets someone else to read it for them.”
“There's no connection between a general travel advisory and a private family vacation, the Secret Service handles logistics for any travel regardless of destination, that's just standard protective protocol, it's not — I mean, yes, it's a resource, but that's not the same as it being political.”
The receipts
Ivanka Trump was photographed taking a surfing lesson in Costa Rica during a family vacation, riding waves on a green surfboard in new photos.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.