From the outside, the Myrtle Beach-based Millers appeared to have a picture-perfect marriage. Mica Miller was a beautiful pastor’s wife whose husband, church leader John-Paul Miller, led a devout congregation. But the Solid Rock Church community did not know that behind closed doors, Mica and John-Paul had a tumultuous relationship, and Mica would ultimately be found dead in a state park with a gunshot wound to her head, after telling authorities she planned to take her own life. The next day, on April 27, 2024, John-Paul took the stage at Solid Rock to share the news: The congregation was now without a creative director to lead the worship, youth, and women’s ministry, and he was without a wife. 

It wasn’t long before the Solid Rock patrons began to ask questions about what led to Mica's death.

The new three-part Netflix docuseries, Death of the Pastor's Wife, charts the now infamous—and ongoing—case against John-Paul, who has been charged with cyberstalking and making false statements to federal investigators, and seeks to uncover what really led to Mica’s death at age 30. Co-directed by showrunner Mike Gasparro and Julia Willoughby Nason (Murdaugh Murders, American Murder: Gabby Petito), the series looks back on Mica’s life with never-before-seen footage and firsthand accounts from her friends and family, many of whom are speaking out for the first time. 

Showrunner Gasparro tells TIME that Mica’s story is “complex and deeply resonant.” The responsibility of bringing what really happened to her to light was key to making the docuseries. “We met with Mica’s family and made sure they felt comfortable entrusting us with her story,” Gasparro says. 

Here’s everything we learned about Mica’s story from the new series.

A whirlwind romance 

John-Paul Miller first saw Mica Francis when she was a teenager attending Solid Rock Church. The Francis family had recently relocated to Myrtle Beach and soon became regulars at the evangelical parish. At the time, Pastor John-Paul was a married father of five. Mica worked as his nanny, according to an affidavit filed by Miller’s first wife, Alison Williams. 

Mica got married at 18 to her first husband, who was also a member of Solid Rock Church. Mica and John-Paul began having an affair in 2015, when Mica was 20 and John-Paul was 35, according to the Francis family; the couple then divorced their respective spouses and wed each other on Nov. 7, 2017 when Mica was 23 and John-Paul, 38. 

“Their 15-year age difference was significant, but even more important was the fact that Mica first met John-Paul ‘JP’ when she was at such a young age,” Nason tells TIME. “She grew up in the church, dedicated much of her life to it, and spent an enormous amount of time around JP and the congregation during some of her most formative years. Mica looked up to JP as both a pastor and an authority figure. As we examined their relationship, it became clear how deeply that imbalance influenced its development. He held a position of tremendous power in her life long before they became romantically involved.” 

Mica’s sister, Sierra Francis, alleged to the Myrtle Beach Sun News that she believed John-Paul “had his sights set on [Mica] from a young age,” and that he had groomed her. John-Paul always maintained that they had a "great marriage" and an "amazing" relationship. Mica Miller’s father, Michael Francis, echoed that their family was never supportive of Mica’s relationship with John-Paul. “I had lunch with her with a minister friend of mine and we talked with her extensively about how it is very, very unwise to be in a relationship with John-Paul,” Michael told the Sun News. 

A tumultuous marriage 

According to the Francis family in the docuseries, Mica was fully wrapped up in John-Paul’s world: She even had gotten John-Paul’s signature tattooed on her body, a choice that seemed “possessive” to her sister Sierra Francis at the time, especially since Mica and John-Paul allegedly had a dynamic others describe as toxic—one that culminated in numerous filings for divorce and legal separations from both sides. 

Mica first filed for divorce from John-Paul after almost exactly six years of marriage, on Oct. 8, 2023, according to court documents. Yet just in time for Valentine’s Day, on Feb. 13, 2024, the divorce was dismissed. Ten days later, John-Paul filed for separation from Mica, which was subsequently dismissed without prejudice on March 12, 2024. 

The legal merry-go-round continued, but as it did, it escalated: Mica contacted Horry County Police for a report of a razor blade being placed in her tire on March 11, 2024, telling police this was the second time her tires were slashed in the past week. Police were dispatched at 1:30 a.m. and Mica named who she believed was responsible for the actions; the name was redacted from the public report. Mica added that she had witnessed “strange activity and what she believes as people following or watching her,” the report said. She even told the officer that “she was afraid for her life.”

This wasn’t the first time Mica had expressed this fear: After her death, her sister Sierra expressed in an affidavit that Mica had voiced her fears of being followed and even allegedly told Sierra, “If I end up with a bullet in my head, it was not by me, it was JP [John-Paul].”

Sierra continued, “I know my sister to have expressed the abuse and violence against her by her husband to others, including family members and members of the church congregation.” Mica had additionally sought a restraining order against her husband in the days prior to her death. 

Yet John-Paul was adamant that he and Mica had a happy family and home life at their Coldwater Circle house in the Azalea Lakes neighborhood near Myrtle Beach. “We were good for each other. She was incredibly affirming. She was a great pastor’s wife,” John-Paul told the Sun News. “She always wanted me to look in the very best light possible.”

John-Paul and Mica also worked closely professionally: Mica served as the church’s creative director and his personal assistant. The duo wanted to keep their marriage and work separated like church and state, and went so far as to include in a joint postnuptial agreement that they would not speak negatively of Solid Rock Ministries and would keep their personal life confidential. The document additionally saw them both waive their rights to seek alimony or financial spousal support in the case of divorce, and that their shared family home—which was owned by Solid Rock—would not be considered marital property.

The final straw

Mica filed for separation for the last time on April 15, 2024. A hearing for the separation was scheduled for June 5. Mica also moved out of her home with John-Paul and began living in an apartment during this time. According to the affidavit, John-Paul was served the papers on April 25, 2024, notifying him of the hearing. Mica was found dead two days later, on April 27, 2024.

The timeline of Mica’s last day goes as follows: At 11:38 a.m., Mica left her residence, as seen on her ring camera. At 12:12 p.m., Mica was seen purchasing a firearm and ammunition at Dick’s Pawn Shop in Myrtle Beach. She left the store by 12:34 p.m. and drove to a North Carolina state park. At 2:54 p.m., Mica called 911 to announce that she was going to kill herself and asked operators to trace her call so her family would be able to find her body. 

Law enforcement officials began investigating the area where the phone call had been made. A witness told the police that they had heard a person crying and then a gunshot. Mica’s body was found in a river by a kayaker. She died from a gunshot wound to the head.

The next day, John-Paul returned to the Solid Rock lectern and gave a sermon, announcing Mica’s death at the end. He told the audience that her death was self-inflicted and cited Mica’s alleged ongoing mental health struggles. 

John-Paul told the press that he was grateful to have the sheriff’s department investigating his wife’s death. “I want them to find out every detail,” Miller said. “I want to know everything, every detail.”

The case goes viral 

John-Paul’s immediate return to public work was one of the first things that raised flags in the Myrtle Beach community. Many found it a bit odd for a grieving husband to not take time away from his parish to cope with the sudden loss of his wife. His sermon was recorded and shared on the church’s website and YouTube page (the video has since been deleted) and included the details of Mica’s service: Solid Rock Church in Market Common was to host the memorial on May 5. 

Mica’s family took to social media to speak out against John-Paul and publicly share their concerns over Mica’s well-being before her death. The Francis family began posting about Mica’s experiences, alluding to the alleged abuse that Mica had suffered at the hands of her husband. (John-Paul has denied any wrongdoing and claims they had a loving marriage.) 

Mica’s mother posted on the Facebook page Voices in the Wilderness that her daughter had “a no contact order and a divorce was filed just days before this tragedy.” Mica’s own past Facebook posts, which detailed abuse and leaving a dangerous situation with the hashtag #abuseawareness, were also recirculated. 

The Robeson County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the case, with Chief Deputy Damien McLean taking the lead. Following a New York Post article about Mica, the story went viral on TikTok, with both Solid Rock church members and strangers from outside the community using the hashtag #JusticeForMica. Protesters stood outside of Solid Rock church wearing shirts that read “Break the silence and end domestic violence #JusticeForMica.”

John-Paul began posting TikTok videos to share his side of the story and refute allegations that he was involved in Mica’s death. Some protesters set forth the theory that John-Paul had murdered Mica; that claim was determined to be unfounded by investigators who proved that John-Paul had an alibi: He was in Charleston, South Carolina, on the day Mica died. John-Paul was at his children’s school for a soccer tournament, the police confirmed.

“When we first became involved, there was an enormous amount of public speculation surrounding Mica’s death. Many people we spoke with questioned what had happened, and media coverage was actively discussing the possibility that she had been killed,” Gasparro told TIME. “We knew it would be impossible to tell Mica’s story responsibly without examining those questions thoroughly. We followed the evidence and spoke with the people closest to the investigation so that we could understand how authorities reached their conclusion.” 

Gasparro added, “Once we had done that, our focus shifted from questioning the official ruling to examining the much more complicated question of why: How a 30-year-old woman who was actively trying to reclaim control of her life reached a point where she felt she could no longer go on. To us, understanding everything that preceded Mica’s death was the heartbeat of the story.” 

The viral nature of the case, and the doubt it seeded, contributed to the closure of Solid Rock in November 2024. John-Paul originally set out to start a new ministry, but instead created a nonprofit, Living Water Church.

The battle between Mica’s family and her widow 

John-Paul publicly pointed to Mica’s mental health issues immediately after her death, citing that he believed she had a mental breakdown at the start of 2024. He claimed that Mica had previously attempted to take her own life, and that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dependent personality disorder. A toxicology report from the North Carolina medical examiner’s officer listed Mica as having had bipolar disorder and a history of suicide attempts.

Mica was open about working through mental health struggles, and even posted social media videos about her journey and offered testimonies at church. But Mica’s family was convinced that her stress and diagnoses were only caused by her strained marriage with John-Paul. 

Mica was hospitalized for mental illness multiple times over the course of the marriage. The most recent time was in February 2024; Mica never permanently returned to the home shared with John-Paul after being discharged. 

John-Paul claimed to Sun News that Mica had told him she wanted to live with him again but was afraid her family would be upset with her since they disapproved of him. “When she was with me for seven years, she was happy, healthy, whole and lived her life and loved it. Apart from me for three months, she committed suicide,” John-Paul said. John-Paul added that he believed Mica’s family convinced her not to take her medications, including lithium, which could have contributed to her decision to end her life. 

Meanwhile, Mica’s family alleged that John-Paul abused Mica for years. Regina Ward, Mica’s family lawyer, said that Mica was never prescribed medications for her mental health and accused John-Paul of forcing her to take his own lithium prescription, even sneaking pills into her food or forcing her to swallow them against her will. There was no lithium prescription for Mica noted on any medical records that surfaced during the investigation. 

“She was mentally healthy until she got snared in his web,” Ward said of Mica on July 15, 2024. “[There has been] no evidence or incident or evaluations or diagnosis of her having any mental health problem until after she gets involved with John-Paul.”

John-Paul, in turn, claimed that the Francis family was so religiously devout that taking medications was against their beliefs, and that they instead encouraged Mica to undergo holistic medical practices. “If her family had simply looked at her and said, ‘Mica if you love him, you can go home and we’ll support you,’ she’d be alive today,” John-Paul told Sun News. “The fact that we had such a great marriage that we did was pretty amazing. It’s very amazing, considering the stress of my job, considering the mental illness, considering her family. I mean, we did very, very well.”

Generations of controversy

John-Paul’s father, Reginald Wayne Miller, is also a pastor. Reginald founded the Cathedral Bible College, which offered degrees in theology, ministry, and other Christian studies. Reginald also once led one of South Carolina’s largest charismatic churches, rooted in the religious movement that emphasizes speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. 

In 2014, Reginald pleaded guilty in federal court to felony charges relating to the treatment of Cathedral Bible College international students ranging from visa fraud to hourly wage violations. He further was at the center of a controversy about sexual improprieties that forced him to move his ministry from Florence to Myrtle Beach, where his son John-Paul later led Solid Rock. In a lawsuit filed by “Jane Doe #1” in February 2025, Reginald and John-Paul were both accused of using their positions within their church communities to engage in “sexual abuse and predatory conduct -- often targeting minors.” Father and son filed a counterclaim in which they "expressly denied" all of the allegations in the lawsuit.

Mica’s belief that she was being stalked

In the time leading up to her death, Mica’s tires were slashed multiple times and she told officers that she was being followed. John-Paul originally denied being involved in this alleged stalking. But in December 2025, the FBI determined that John-Paul had not been telling the truth to officials. A federal grand jury indicted John-Paul on charges of cyberstalking and making false statements to the FBI.

Prosecutors claimed that John-Paul admitted to hiring a private investigator to “protect Mica from buying firearms,” but that he had actually hired people to follow her and and cyberstalk her over alleged adultery. The indictment also stated that John-Paul lied when he denied damaging Mica’s tires; the FBI later learned that he had purchased a tire deflation device online.

The federal indictment further alleged that John-Paul had a pattern of abusive behavior toward Mica that began in November 2022. John-Paul tracked her car via surveillance devices, called her excessively at more than 50 times in a single day, and anonymously posted nude images online without her consent. Department of Justice documents cite that John-Paul began harassing Mica while they were estranged and interfered with her finances to exert control when they were apart. . 

John-Paul was arraigned on Jan. 12, 2026 in federal court in Florence, South Carolina. The case has been continued to October 2026 for a court date. The pastor pleaded not guilty to the federal charges and has maintained that he has no responsibility for Mica’s death, per ABC News. If he is found guilty, he could face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for cyberstalking and two years in prison for making false statements, plus a fine of up to $250,000.

"The FBI, as well as our local partners that helped us solve this case, were incredibly thorough, detail-oriented; they left no stone unturned. And when they were ready and we were ready, we brought the charges as soon as we could," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Elle E. Klein. "We're in constant contact with the victim's family. We're trying to respect them as they're going through this, because while Mica's gone, she's certainly not forgotten, and we want to stand by them through this whole process."

The legacy of Mica’s Law

While the Francis family awaits John-Paul’s trial, they are focusing on helping people who have suffered from spousal emotional violence and domestic abuse. Ward, their lawyer, told supporters to turn their attention away from protesting John-Paul and instead work to get a coercive control bill passed; they intend to call it Mica’s Law. The bill will modify the domestic violence law to include coercive control behaviors like isolating victims from their family, depriving them of basic needs, and stalking. 

“There are still major gaps in how coercive control is understood—not only by the public, but within our legal system,” Nason tells TIME. “ It can be difficult to recognize and even harder to legislate because it often involves a sustained pattern of behavior rather than one isolated incident.” 

Nason continues, “I think audiences are becoming more aware that domestic abuse does not always begin as physical violence. Technology has created additional ways for someone to exert control over another person…Stories like Mica’s are important because they give audiences a fuller understanding of what abuse can look like. When these behaviors are viewed individually, they may be minimized or dismissed. When you see the entire pattern, the danger becomes much clearer.” 

Death of the Pastor's Wife showrunner Gasparro has a stark message for viewers: “Our role as filmmakers is not to predict or control what happens legislatively. Our responsibility is to tell Mica’s story as honestly and effectively as possible, raise awareness, and help viewers recognize patterns that can otherwise be difficult to see. That is the kind of impact we hope Mica’s story can have. If it helps even one person recognize a dangerous situation in their own life, or in the life of someone they love, we would consider that incredibly meaningful.” 

If you or someone you know need help, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Vice President J.D. Vance on Monday called Canada a “state,” before claiming it was an accident.

“We have to remember, Canada is a state—sorry, Freudian slip,” Vance said during a political event in Maine, after being asked about the recent heated trade talks between the U.S. and its northern neighbor. “That was actually an accident.”

He went on to say that “Canada is a country that has underinvested in its military that quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America.”

Vance’s slip-up comes after President Donald Trump has hurled a number of barbs at Canada and its political leaders since he took office for a second term. The President has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st state,” suggesting that the U.S. should annex its northern neighbor. In March, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future Governor of Canada.” 

Carney has repeatedly and firmly pushed back on Trump’s comments; last year, the Canadian Prime Minister said of the suggestion of annexing Canada: “As I’ve said to anyone who’s raised this issue in private or in public, including the President, it will never happen.”

When TIME asked Trump last year whether he was “trolling a little bit” when he speaks about making Canada a U.S. state, Trump replied, “Actually, no, I’m not.”

Trump: ‘Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive’

In a Truth Social post on Monday afternoon, Trump continued to fling digs at Canada.

“America has been carrying Canada for decades, but no longer!” Trump said in his post. “The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada. Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive — It’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States — Their key to survival.”

Trump referred to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been a vocal critic of the tariffs that the Trump Administration has imposed or threatened to impose on Canadian goods. In addition to calling Ford Carney’s “Flunky,” Trump said the Premier was “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford,” a former mayor of Ontario’s capital, Toronto.

Tensions between the allied countries have escalated in recent days. Trump claimed earlier last week that, “subject to the finalization of documents,” the two nations had reached a deal, but trade negotiations between the two broke down on Friday, and both sides have pointed the finger at the other.

In a statement shared late on Friday, Carney said that “progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians” and so he “decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S.” He accused the U.S. of proposing “last-minute changes” that he called “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal."

On Monday, Trump said that he plans to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% starting on Jan. 1, 2027. His 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of goods imported into the U.S. from Canada went into effect over the weekend, and Carney said that Canada would respond with retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods that will take effect on Sept. 8.

At a press conference on Monday, Carney said that Canada was still open to trade talks, but that any deal would have to “be one that respects Canada’s sovereignty.”

“When the Americans go to the negotiation table first with the right attitude towards our industries and a true partnership, of course we’ll come to the negotiating table,” he said.

“An attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” he continued, “that’s not something we’re going to accept.”

The ongoing “Hawk” fire outside the city of Reno, Nevada, has prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in yet another devastating blaze contributing to one of the worst U.S. wildfire seasons in recent history. 

Roughly 42,000 people have been evacuated around Reno, while an additional 45,000 were warned that they may also have to flee. The evacuation is among the largest prompted by a U.S. wildfire this year, following the fires around Spokane, Washington, in early August during which roughly 60,000 people were evacuated.

The Reno evacuations mark another flashpoint of a record-breaking fire season. The fire is dwarfed in acreage by larger blazes from this year, at roughly 15,000 acres burned so far, but its direct effect on civilians is one of the largest in recent years, and demonstrates the potential risk that worsening wildfires may have on people and their communities in years to come.

Here’s how fires around the U.S. have set new records, and why they have been so bad this year.

More acres burned and more entrapments

Compared to the past 10 years, more acres have been burned this year in the U.S. to date.

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) posted on Monday that firefighters have responded to 50,784 wildfires that have scorched over 7.8 million acres this year: 168% of the 10-year average for acres burned, and 129% of the average for total fires.

Around the same time last year, roughly 4 million acres had been burned, around 50% of the current acreage for 2026 so far, according to NIFC tracking.

The U.S. has also been at the highest level of “fire preparedness” for 38 days, since July 18th, at a five out of five, which means that federal resources are strained and may not be available to address every new fire.

Read More: The U.S. Is Now At Its Worst Level of Wildfire Preparedness. What Does That Mean?

The 10-year average for fire preparedness in August is four. The last time the fire preparedness level was at a five for the entire month of August was in 2021.

Meanwhile the 10-year annual average for days spent at level four and five combined is 48 days, and so far, the U.S. has already spent 57 days within that range, after reaching level four in late June.

There has also been a 20-year high of firefighter entrapments, life-threatening situations in which firefighters’ safety zones and escape routes are compromised. According to a Reuters report, there had been 12 entrapments in 2026 as of Aug. 13, more than the year-total average of nine in the last 20 years. This year’s entrapments also marked the highest year-to-date figure since 2006.

Six out of 13 firefighter deaths have involved entrapments, the report shows. An average of 17 firefighter fatalities occur each year from wildfires.

Hotter, drier, and windier conditions

Wildfire trackers often use the “30-30-30” rule to identify conditions that can lead to extreme wildfires. The rule refers to when the temperature is at least 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), humidity is at 30% or lower, and wind speeds are at 30 kilometers per hour or more (roughly 19 miles per hour). When combined, these hot, dry, and windy conditions can produce extremely large and destructive fires, as they have this year.

Reno has experienced an average daily high temperature of 92.8 degrees Fahrenheit (33.7 Celsius), 27% humidity, and 18 miles per hour (29 kilometers per hour) daily maximum wind speed over the last 10 days, including the week before the “Hawk” fires began on Saturday and the three days since as the blaze continues.

Although the 30-30-30 rule is a metric for local weather conditions’ effect on wildfires, increases have been exhibited this year compared to past years across the U.S. in each of its categories—temperature, dryness, and wind speed.

When it came to temperature, the average in the contiguous U.S. from January through July was the second warmest in 132 years, at 4.2 degrees Celsius (55.5 Fahrenheit), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

July in particular was the hottest month on record in the U.S., with an average of 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit (24.9 Celsius). Nevada specifically had one of its warmest July’s on record, according to NOAA.

Read More: What Living Through the Hottest July Ever Looked Like Across the U.S.

The U.S. also had its driest January-July since 2012, according to NOAA. And as of Aug. 4, nearly half of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing drought, including across much of the West.

Wind speeds generally fluctuate the most by region, but from January through June of this year, they averaged 0.5% above the 20-year average during 2005-2024, according to an S&P Global analysis.

These hotter, drier, and windier conditions have set the stage for an active wildfire season.

One underlying explanation for increasingly fire-prone conditions is climate change, which has contributed to longer-lasting fire seasons, now lasting for six to eight months in some areas, compared to what used to be roughly four months in past decades.

“Generally we're having drier summers and higher winds,” Peter Sunderland, professor of fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland, previously told TIME. “We are seeing more and more climate extremes.”

If you’ve been excitedly awaiting the return of the woolly mammoth, you’ll have to be patient a little longer. It was in 2021 that the newly established, Dallas-based company Colossal Biosciences announced plans to use modern gene-editing technology and DNA harvested from mammoth remains to manufacture a mammoth embryo, implant it in the womb of an elephant surrogate, and bring the great, gentle, six-ton beast—which vanished from the planet more than 4,000 years ago—back into the modern world. The target date for a pregnancy was 2027; the target date for the birth was 2028.

No more. In a recent conversation with TIME, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm concedes that those goal posts have moved more than a little. “We are thinking it will be in the early 2030s,” he says. “We don’t have a hard date. Not 2036, but not 2030 either.”

In just the past year, Colossal has learned vastly more about both the mammoth and the elephant genomes than has ever been known before, not only improving the odds that the mammoth can be brought back to life, or de-extincted, but also unpacking basic genetic science that could one day have knock-on effects for humans—including potentially increasing resistance to cancer.

Bringing back the dire wolf

Colossal proved its de-extinction chops in the spring of 2025, when it announced that it had brought the extinct dire wolf back to life, editing the genome of the closely related gray wolf to replicate the features of its vanished cousin—including a white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. 

To work that genetic magic, Colossal scientists collected dire wolf DNA from an ear bone and a tooth unearthed in two ancient samples, sequenced the genome, and compared it to that of the gray wolf. They then harvested cells from a living gray wolf and made 20 edits on 14 genes using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, which produced the critical dire wolf characteristics. Finally, they extracted the nucleus of the edited cell, inserted it into a domestic dog ovum whose own nucleus had been removed, and implanted the resulting embryo into the womb of a domestic hound. Nine weeks later, the dire wolves were born.

Why woolly mammoths are so hard to de-extinct

To do something similar with the woolly mammoth, Colossal discovered that the work would be a heavier genetic lift than their research teams had originally expected. The initial estimate was that it would take edits to about 60 genes to turn an elephant nucleus into a mammoth nucleus that could then be used to create a mammoth embryo. Now that number is about 150—and rising. 

Among the genes and regulatory switches that have been discovered are ones that shrink the mammoth ear to about one-tenth the size of an elephant’s ear. In the hot climates in which Asian and African elephants live, large, heavily vascularized ears serve as heat dumps, cooling the blood and the body as a whole. That would not do for the mammoth, which made its home during the Ice Age and needed to husband all the heat it could. Mammoth tails are shorter than those of elephants too— for the same heat-retention reason—and Colossal scientists have found the gene that expresses that as well.

The genetics of the mammoth’s characteristic heavy coat have also been unpacked. Nearly all hairy mammals—humans included—have oil-secreting glands known as sebaceous glands in the skin. The oil keeps individual hairs supple and prevents them from drying and breaking. Elephants, which have a very sparse covering of bristly hair across their bodies, were thought to be an exception to this rule. That made the job of engineering a mammoth from an elephant more difficult, since mammoths surely had sebaceous glands to sustain their extravagant coat. But Colossal researchers conducted dissection and close examination of samples of elephant skin and found that that earlier received wisdom was wrong—the skin does contain small, rudimentary sebaceous-like structures. The trick now is to isolate the genes that code for the glands and edit them to create the fully developed version the mammoth will need.

The researchers also analyzed the makeup of elephant hair and determined that 90% of every strand is composed of nine different proteins. They then tracked down which genes code for that protein production and govern hair developmental patterns, which typically include periods of growth, rest, and regrowth. Tests of these genes are underway, sometimes with the assistance of other animals.

In March 2025, Colossal revealed that it had created a small brood of 38 woolly mice, engineered with mammoth coding for shaggy hair written into their genome. The mice have thrived and bred, passing on their long, coarse hair to their pups. That was a good start, but mice aren’t mammoths, and to study how effective the genetic editing is, researchers will need to work with a larger mammal. Colossal promises that a woolly pig is coming, though the company does not say when it will be revealed.

Digging deeper into the genome of the mammoth, Colossal scientists have extracted bits of its regulatory DNA and inserted them into living elephant skin cells and watched as regulators turned the behavior of the genes up or down—critical work if you want to design other genes to order.

“It’s a little weird and Frankensteiny,” says Lamm, “but we’ve done that.”

Potential implications for humans

Colossal researchers are also exploring one of the elephant’s more remarkable features: its resistance to cancer. As a large-bodied mammal, elephants ought to be highly susceptible to the disease, especially considering that an elephant's body contains 100 times more cells than a human’s, creating more opportunities for cancer to occur. But cancer accounts for less than 5% of elephant deaths, compared to 16% for humans.

That was a longstanding mystery until recently. Both human and elephant cells are now known to carry a tumor-suppressor gene labeled TP53. When DNA in a cell is damaged—by cancer or other means—the gene codes for the release of the p53 protein, which either halts the damaged cell’s growth cycle to allow for repair, or, if the DNA is too corrupted, kills the cell. Humans carry two copies of the TP53 gene, while elephants carry 20—making for much greater cancer resistance. Additionally, elephants but not humans carry what is known as an LIF6 gene, which also produces a p53 protein, one that specifically targets the mitochondria—an energy-producing organelle located in the cellular cytoplasm—of damaged calls, killing them before they can divide and spread. 

Other researchers are already exploring if p53 proteins can be manipulated in humans to increase cancer resistance. Colossal is casting a wider net. On August 20, it announced the launch of a new company, Astromech, which uses AI and deep learning to analyze the genomic data of any species, trace its evolutionary history, and forecast its future, anticipating its adaptation to changing environment, its disease susceptibility, and the possibility of so-called genetic bottlenecks—or lack of genetic diversity—that occur when an endangered population of animals grows too small. Colossal scientists are using Astromech to study elephants’ cancer resistance in depth—which could have broader uses and implications.

“Colossal is not conducting research on humans, but its work with mammoth, elephant, and other genomic datasets could yield insights relevant to human cancer research,” says a company spokesperson. “Understanding mechanisms such as elephants’ TP53-related cancer resistance is exactly the kind of problems Astromech is trying to understand, leveraging the mammoth, elephants and other datasets.”

For now, the goal of turning all of this scientific benchwork into a walking, breathing, breeding mammoth goes on—even if at a slower pace than originally predicted. “I hate to say this, because I don’t want to call the mammoth a product,” says Lamm, “but it will be a better product because of our deeper analysis of what truly made a mammoth a mammoth.”

Iran’s currency plummeted in value Monday, hitting a record-low open-market rate of 2.02 million rials to the dollar, amid the White House’s launch of “Operation Economic Outcast,” which aims to force concessions from Iran through isolation and a financial stranglehold.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Sunday that an “economic D-Day” was coming, and he shared a first sense of what that might look like at a press conference the following day.

"D-Day marked a historic campaign with our allies,” Bessent said Monday. “Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe."

The U.S. announced sanctions on more than 60 targets while expanding sanctionable sectors to digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—which Bessent described as some of the country’s “most vital lifelines.”

The government may also impose secondary sanctions on Iran’s trade partners, Bessent said, adding that those sanctions could roll out in a matter of weeks. 

The threat is meant to deter countries from bolstering the country’s waning economy and “collapse every last option for Iran,” Bessent said, describing it as "economic asphyxiation." 

Read More: The U.S.-Iran War: By the Numbers

Though Bessent didn’t identify which Iranian partners might be targeted by a new round of sanctions, he did name one financial institution: Bank Melli, the Iranian government-owned bank with branches in about a dozen countries. Bessent said that “every branch” of the bank must be “shuttered and dark” or it will lose access to the U.S. dollar. The Treasury has previously claimed that the bank provides services to entities that support Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs.

Since the start of its war with Iran on Feb. 28, the Trump Administration has applied both military and economic pressure to achieve its goal of dismantling the nation’s nuclear program.

Bessent’s remarks elaborate on President Donald Trump’s announcement on Aug. 19 that the U.S. would launch “the most crushing economic operation ever mounted” against Iran. 

Iran initially dismissed the threat. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on Sunday called the U.S. “desperate.” And Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state television on Aug. 22 that Iran would turn against any neighboring Gulf states that yield to the U.S. in what he called an “economic war.” 

“Any country that takes part in imposing economic restrictions on us will be regarded as an enemy,” he said.

Given Iran’s sustained control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, any retaliation could push Brent crude oil above Monday’s closing price of about $92 per barrel or the wartime high of about $120 per barrel.

In a war that has been largely defined by its threat to the global economy, experts wonder whether sanctions against Tehran’s trade allies will further isolate it—and if that will succeed in forcing Iran to capitulate to the demands of the United States.

Could U.S. sanctions force Iran to end the war?

The Trump Administration has argued that in tightening sanctions against Iran, the country will face unprecedented isolation and economic pain.

But Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, tells TIME that the move doesn’t guarantee compliance. 

“We really need to keep in mind here that Iran has been under U.S. sanctions for the last 40 years, and we've had several moments in which we have done some sort of a major escalation,” he says. “And each time, it has failed to translate into a policy change from Iran.”

Parsi notes that neither Bessent nor Trump has outlined specific demands for Iran—focusing more on maximum isolation rather than defining clear, achievable diplomatic terms. 

Because of this, he argues that Iran is even less likely to succumb to increased pressure.

“What we know of the pattern in the past is that the Iranians will not capitulate—they will escalate,” Parsi says. “This is the same miscalculation Trump made when he thought that the threat of war would cause them to surrender, and instead they prepared themselves for war, and they fought back. And six months later, we're here.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that Iran is meeting with its neighbor, Oman, about regulating passage through the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil formerly passed. Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, is visiting Tehran on Tuesday to continue high-level talks on “bilateral and regional issues.”

Controlling the waterway—a pain point for the global economy—has been Iran’s greatest strength in the war. Any agreement could affect Iran’s leverage over the waterway, although Oman has not publicly endorsed Tehran’s broader demands.

Trump last week threatened that the U.S. would target Oman next if it cooperated with Iran on this matter, telling Fox News: “We’ll bomb the s— out of them.” Experts have said, however, that this is an idle threat and that bombing Oman would be a mistake. 

Continuing to enforce its blockade on the Strait does, however, come at a cost to Iran. A June analysis from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies estimated that Iran may be incurring economic damages of about $435 million per day while enforcing it. 

How is the plummeting value of the rial affecting Iranians?

Ryan Costello, the policy director at the National Iranian American Council, tells TIME that implementing additional sanctions may not achieve the desired result—but will likely hurt Iranians. 

“Regrettably, it has had very harsh impacts on ordinary Iranians—pushing millions out of the middle class, which is often seen as an engine for successful democratic change over time,” Costello says. “This currency depreciation has a real cost for ordinary Iranians, making their life ever more unaffordable.”

According to the International Monetary Fund, Iran’s average annual inflation rate is projected to reach 68.9% in 2026. The depreciation of the rial—which was already the world’s least valuable currency before it dipped this week—will strain Iranian citizens who are already struggling to buy groceries and pay for monthly living expenses.

There is a “real risk” of greater global market destabilization the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, Costello says. 

“Iran's leadership is signaling that it will respond to intensified economic pressure by further restricting energy flows, and it appears to have the capacity to act on their threat,” Costello says.

In addition to its command of the Strait, he explains: "Iran and other aligned forces are demonstrating an ability to strike energy targets with missiles and drones, both in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. So Iran and/or its allies could target commercial ships, as well as pipelines, ports, refineries, and other critical energy infrastructure."

And there’s a second major risk if the U.S. places sanctions on certain global powers who buy Iranian oil—particularly economic powerhouse China.

“China could take steps to punish the U.S. economy in turn,” Costello explains. 

He says that both risks could be “very damaging,” with economic ramifications that span the globe.

Why Trump is escalating economic pressure on Iran

The U.S.-Iran war is nearing its six-month mark, and peace negotiations have effectively stalled.

The memorandum of understanding established in June—which gave the nations 60 days to work out terms for Iran’s nuclear program and renew uninterrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—expired Aug. 17. It unraveled in July as the U.S. struck hundreds of targets in Iran, and Tehran retaliated against its allies in the region, including Kuwait and Bahrain. But as the U.S. continued to draw down its munitions stockpiles, Iran held steady with its blockade of the Strait.

Now, Trump has changed his tactics.

“This is where the real problem is: He's going back to economic warfare because military warfare didn't work,” Parsi says. 

If additional sanctions fail to force Iran to yield to some of Trump’s demands, Parsi says the President may be running out of options.

“The only exit out of this is actually through diplomacy,” he says. “Otherwise, the U.S. is just going to go back and forth between economic and military action.”

One route to relief may come by way of Pakistan, which helped mediate the June ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. It dispatched a high-level delegation, led by Field Marshal Asim Munir, to Tehran this week to encourage its leadership to work toward a more lasting peace agreement. 

But Parsi contends that the stream of threats from the U.S. may make Iran even less likely to reconcile, saying: “This does not end up becoming the end of the conflict. It just ends up becoming another cycle in the escalation spiral.”

Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin and Doona!’s Yang Se-jong star as ghost-whispering hotel heiress Cheon Yeo-ri and ace prosecutor Ma Gang-uk, respectively, in the supernatural romance series Spooky in Love. In the Korean drama, which broadcast domestically on tvN and was distributed globally by Netflix, Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are initially brought together by their shared desire for justice. For Yeo-ri, this takes the form of helping the ghosts she alone can see. For Gang-uk, it means doing a good, by-the-book job as an investigator. But when Gang-uk learns Yeo-ri’s secret, the two grow closer.

While Spooky in Love starts out with a strong, ghost-of-the-week format, the second half of the drama leans more into corporate in-fighting and family drama as context for Yeo-ri and Gang-uk’s romance. When Chairwoman Baek insists that Yeo-ri get engaged in order to secure a more stable future for the hotel and resort company, Yeo-ri side-steps the advances of family friend and fellow chaebol Kang Min-hwan (Ong Seong-wu) to announce she is engaged to Gang-uk. What starts as a fake relationship to keep Yeo-ri’s grandmother off of her back soon develops into the real thing. But can Yeo-ri and Gang-uk’s love survive Min-hwan’s machinations to take control of both Yeo-ri and her company? Here’s everything that happens in the Spooky in Love finale.

Yeo-ri’s supernatural powers, explained

Yeo-ri wasn’t born with the ability to see ghosts. She developed it 12 years prior to the start of the series, when she nearly died in the mysterious yacht accident that killed her boyfriend and Min-hwan’s little brother, Kang Ji-hwan (Kim Min-chul). The condition has ghosts constantly nagging Yeo-ri for help, and also keeps her isolated from the land of the living. If she touches hands with someone else, they will temporarily gain the ability to see ghosts for a month. As a result, she wears gloves constantly, and keeps a physical distance from her friends, family, and co-workers. 

The stakes of Yeo-ri’s secret are intensified due to the power her family holds. Yeo-ri is the heir to the Reina Group, a corporate hotel chain that wields immense wealth. Yeo-ri’s grandmother, Baek Kyung-ja (Ye Soo-jung), plans to pass the baton to Yeo-ri—rather than step-daughter Ok Gye-hui (Baek Ji-won) or her adult children, Ha-ri (Cho Hye-joo) and Don-jun (Lee Dal). However, if Chairwoman Baek, or the larger public, finds out that Yeo-ri is haunted by ghosts, it could call her ability to run the family corporation into question. 

Still, Yeo-ri’s sense of justice runs deep. In Spooky in Love’s early episodes, Yeo-ri is visited by the ghost of Jang Eun-ju (Yoon Hye-rim), a young woman who was murdered by her boyfriend, Park Seung-jae (Kim Do-wan), after she becomes pregnant with their child. Seung-jae is well-connected. Not only is he a rich pro golfer, but his father is one of the leading contenders in the next presidential race. When he is initially tried for murder, with Gang-uk acting as prosecutor, he is acquitted due to his father’s immense influence. It is only when Gang-uk and Yeo-ri team up that they are able to gather more evidence, and definitively pin the murder on Seung-jae.

What happened on the yacht?

Yeo-ri grew up close to Kang Ji-hwan and Kang Min-hwan, brothers poised to inherit ownership of CL Raymond Group. Though both brothers had feelings for Yeo-ri, Ji-hwan was the first to ask her out. For Min-hwan, this intensified the jealousy he had long felt of his little brother. Jin-hwan, who looked up to his brother, didn’t realize that he was often treated better by some members of the family compared to Min-hwan, who was adopted. When Jin-hwan started dating Yeo-ri, it was the final straw for Min-hwan.

On the day of the accident, the brothers are out on a yacht with their friends, including Yeo-ri and fellow rich kid Park Seung-jae. We learn in the penultimate episode that when the yacht hit a rock and Jin-hwan was thrown over the side, Min-hwan had the chance to pull his brother back onboard, but let the pleading Jin-hwan fall into the water below instead. Jin-hwan dies, and Yeo-ri, who also went overboard in the accident, is rescued from the water. She is wearing a protective pendant gifted to Jin-hwan by his grandmother. He asked her to wear it while they were on the boat, joking that, if something should happen, she should live and he will die. 

Later, Yeo-ri and Gang-uk seek out the shaman who made the pendant. The original maker is dead, but her daughter informs them that the power of the pendant changed Yeo-ri and Jin-hwan’s fates. That power, paired with Yeo-ri’s inability to let Jin-hwan move on in the immediate aftermath of the accident, led to Yeo-ri’s ability to see ghosts. The shaman tells Gang-uk and Yeo-ri that, in order for Yeo-ri to stop seeing ghosts, she owes the afterlife a life.

Gang-uk’s connection to Jin-hwan

Gang-uk, who was raised by his grandmother, did not grow up in the same social circles as Yeo-ri, Min-hwan, and the other members of the chaebol class. However, he shares a unique connection to Jin-hwan. When Jin-hwan died, a sick Gang-uk was given Jin-hwan’s heart. The transplant allowed him to live on. Ever since, Jin-hwan and Min-hwan’s mother, Song Hee-won (Kim Seo-ra) has kept tabs on Gang-uk through his grandmother. Though she lost one of her sons, it makes her happy to see Gang-uk doing well. 

Min-hwan’s crimes escalate

This truth of Jin-hwan’s death is known only by Min-hwan for more than a decade. Yeo-ri doesn’t remember what happened during the accident and, even if she did, she didn’t witness what occurred between the brothers that day. However, when Seung-jae temporarily gets out of jail to attend his father’s funeral, he happens to stumble upon a camcorder memory card with footage of Min-hwan choosing not to save Jin-hwan. Seung-jae attempts to blackmail Min-hwan with the evidence. When the two meet up in an abandoned warehouse, Min-hwan kills him for it.

Gang-uk finds Min-hwan’s cufflink at the scene of the crime, but Min-hwan counters. He hires someone to hit Gang-uk with a truck. Yeo-ri pushes the man she loves out of the way at the last second, saving his life and putting her own in grave danger. She is hit by the truck, and ends up in a coma. As Yeo-ri’s life hangs in the balance, we see her traverse a beautiful kind of purgatory. The ghosts she has helped in the past 12 years, including Eun-ju, are waiting for her there. They lend her some of their warmth to keep her from crossing to the other side. 

Yeo-ri and Jin-hwan balance the scales

Still, Yeo-ri finally does make it to a Styx-like river, a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Before she can step onto the boat that would bring her across, the ghost of Jin-hwan appears to take her place. The two share a teary conversation in which they process Jin-hwan’s death. Yeo-ri apologizes for living instead of him, but Jin-hwan doesn’t see it that way. He says she still has so much to live for, and that the ghosts she has helped are rooting for her. When Yeo-ri wakes back up, she no longer has the power to see ghosts. Jin-hwan has crossed to the other side; the afterlife has been given the soul it was robbed of 12 years prior. 

Min-hwan is brought to justice

Unbeknownst to Min-hwan, Seung-jae has hidden the memory card in a hollow golf ball at the warehouse. When Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are investigating, they find the card and have the evidence to take Min-hwan down. In the most dramatic way possible, Yeo-ri reveals the evidence to Min-hwan’s mother and the other people gathered at Jin-hwan’s memorial service. More than losing his power or going to jail, Min-hwan seems most distraught at the idea of his mother discovering his betrayal. A year later, when she visits her remorseful son in jail, she tells him that after he has finished serving his time, she will be waiting for him. Min-hwan, who always thought his mother’s love for her biological son diminished her love for her adopted son, can perhaps finally see otherwise.

Does Spooky in Love have a happy ending? 

Spooky in Love has the happiest of endings. A year following the main events of the series finale, Yeo-ri is announced as the new chairwoman of Reina. Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are happily together. Gang-uk, who had been transferred out of Seoul after reporting internal corruption at the prosecutor’s office, has just received a promotion back in the capital city where Yeo-ri lives. The two visit Siena Hall, the Reina wedding property that symbolizes Yeo-ri’s late parents’ love for one another, and walk together, hand in hand. 

When the two first started falling for one another, Yeo-ri had said that her greatest wish was to walk hand-in-hand with the person she liked. Then, she was too afraid to touch anyone, burdened by the certainty she would pass her curse onto them. Now, she does so, unafraid. The simple scene doesn’t just demonstrate the love between Yeo-ri and Gang-uk; it demonstrates the intimacy and warmth Yeo-ri is able to let into her life more broadly. She is no longer alone, and Gang-uk is only one part of that reality.

President Donald Trump threatened to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% as the trade rift and political slanging match between the neighboring nations escalated.

Trump announced Monday morning that U.S. tariffs on all Canadian cars and trucks, automotive parts, and steel will increase to 50% starting Jan. 1, 2027.

“Build in the U.S. and there are zero tariffs. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst nations in the world to deal with,” he said on social media.

Trump’s comments came after trade talks between the two countries broke down, with each side accusing the other of making eleventh-hour demands that derailed negotiations.

“They feel entitled, and yet, we don’t need Canada, they need us!” the President said, repeating his accusation that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years.”

Trump previously touted the nearly finished deal between the two countries last Tuesday.

However, negotiations broke down on Friday, and the Administration's 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Canada took effect Saturday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match the U.S.’s tariffs “dollar for dollar.”

“We are stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, and more ambitious,” Carney said during a press conference Saturday, referring to the year-long trade rift that has come to affect both countries.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And promised: “That will never, ever happen.” We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.”

Both sides have since blamed the other for making unreasonable demands late in the negotiating process.

“While we believed, earlier this week, that we were moving toward a mutually beneficial agreement, in recent days, the U.S. proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada, calling into question the reliability of any deal,” Carney said on Saturday. “In short, they asked too much and offered too little.”

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, meanwhile, framed the breakdown in negotiations as leaving the U.S. with little choice but to retaliate against Canada.

“We’ve said enough, and so we’ve taken countermeasures. Our interest is in protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains,” he told "Fox & Friends" on Saturday.

Greer said the Republican Administration had offered to cut tariffs on steel, autos, and lumber, “things that are sensitive for them. And they’ve always had the best deal, and they still would have an even better deal, but they didn’t want that.”

As a result, he said, “We’re moving forward with measures that respond to Canadian retaliation.”

The broader 50% tariffs that took effect Saturday were initially announced in July, and would affect around 5% of trade between the U.S.-Canada.

Shortly after the collapse of the talks, Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday and said that Canada “wants the benefits of being a State, without being one” and that it has “also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of tariffs. No more!!!”

Despite not being clear what the President meant, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly rejected.

Canada retaliates as U.S. lawmakers warn of higher costs

The collapse of the deal and escalating trade tensions between Washington and Ottawa have been met with both praise and criticism on either side of the border.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford praised Carney for standing firm and refusing to accept what he described as a “bad deal.”

“It was a bad deal for Ontario. It was a bad deal for the auto sector, the steel sector and manufacturing sector,” he said. “We never started this fight, but I can assure you we're going to win.”

On the U.S. side, Trump has faced criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Trump’s tariffs “have created higher costs and chaos.”

“His 50% tariffs on Canadian goods will raise prices. And now Canada is retaliating dollar for dollar, which will hurt Minnesota farmers, businesses, and workers,” she said Monday of the newly announced tariffs.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine similarly warned that the “on-again/off-again trade talks between the U.S. and Canada lead to higher costs, risk, and uncertainty for Maine businesses.”

“If the Administration proceeds with these tariffs, they will increase costs for Maine families, as most businesses will have no choice but to pass on the tariffs to their customers through higher prices,” she said Saturday after trade talks broke down, urging “both sides to return to the negotiating table.”

Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia warned that this latest round of automobile tariffs will have “devastating consequences.”  

“President Trump’s new 50% tariffs on Canada will disrupt supply chains and raise costs for Virginia businesses of every size and in every industry, and retaliatory tariffs will hurt Virginians,” she said Monday.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met privately with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner in recent weeks, prompting criticism from some Democrats ahead of approaching midterm elections, according to reports.

Although Kushner, who served as a senior West Wing adviser during Trump’s first term, does not have a formal role in the current Administration, he has remained involved in Trump’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and Russia.

During the meeting, the pair were said to have discussed housing, immigration, and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground.

The report comes less than three months before the November midterms, when Democrats are favored to retake control of the House from Republicans, who currently hold both chambers of Congress. A Democratic victory would put Jeffries in line to become speaker and give the party greater oversight powers to investigate the Trump Administration.

The meeting—an unusual instance of a top Democrat and a Trump confidant coming together to discuss potential areas of agreement—has drawn scrutiny from some within Democratic circles. It was first reported Sunday by The New York Times and has since been confirmed by multiple outlets.

“Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people," Jeffries says in a statement to TIME. "To stop the madness, we have repeatedly made clear that an extremist approach will not work and will be met with forceful opposition. The American people want bold change and that’s what House Democrats will deliver.”

“In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us,” the statement reads.

TIME has also reached out to the White House and Kushner for comment.

Asked whether he supported the meeting during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said: “I’m in favor of people meeting with whoever they want to discuss ideas. But it’s one thing to have a meeting. It’s another thing to see something real come out of that.”

Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Barack Obama and now a co-host of the podcast Pod Save America, was far less diplomatic.

“Jared Kushner has no actual government job, he just uses his family connections to get money from Gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way Jeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas,” Vietor said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he first learned of the meeting that same day, when reports began circulating in the media.

"I don't know what that's about," Johnson said on Fox News. "I know Jared has interests and lots of other things going on. He's not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House."

Johnson, however, remained confident that Republicans could retain control of the House.

“I’m telling you what, you better not bet against the House Republicans,” he said.

Trump has met with the top Democratic leaders of the House and Senate only once since returning to office, when the President attempted last year to reach an agreement to prevent a government shutdown. Those talks ultimately failed, leading to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The relationship between Trump, Jeffries, and other members of the Democratic leadership has often been marked by conflict and back-and-forth name-calling.

In late April, Trump called Jeffries a “low IQ person” and attacked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over their opposition to the Iran war, branding them “traitor Democrats.”

Jeffries, in turn, called Trump the “dumbest President ever” in response to the President’s insults during a press conference.

Trump has continued to attack the top House Democrat as "low IQ" and a "thug” branding him as a “danger” to the country.

More recently, however, Trump’s tone toward Jeffries appears to have softened. In an interview earlier this month with Punchbowl News, the President said he could work with the Democratic leader and described him as a "nice guy."

"People are harsh on me. I'm harsh on them. It's part of the world," Trump said. "I'd probably get along with him very well."

Since returning to the White House, Trump has often sought to bypass Congress and pursue policy through executive action, from curbing birthright citizenship to the implementation of tariffs.

That dynamic could change if Democrats take control of the House, where Republicans currently hold a slim majority of 218 Republicans to 212 Democrats and one independent.

A Democratic-controlled House would give the party the power to block parts of Trump’s legislative agenda, launch high-profile congressional investigations, issue subpoenas, and initiate impeachment proceedings.

Trump—who was impeached twice during his first term—has urged voters to back Republicans in the midterms, arguing that Democrats would use their power to impeach him again.

“I’m going to be impeached. They're going to impeach me. They have no idea why,” he told a crowd during a rally in South Carolina last Friday.

The latest Emerson College polling, released August 20, found congressional Democrats leading Republicans by nearly 8 points. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll released Aug. 17 found Democrats ahead by 5 points. All 435 House seats are up for election in November.

Look closely at a painting, and you might be able to see where an artist changed their mind. Beneath the finished surface, there may be an abandoned line, a figure moved several inches to the left, a color that looked splendid in the morning and became unbearable by night. There may be a smudgy fingerprint at the edge of the canvas. The back may hold a date, a repair, uneven staples, a signature, or the name of a previous owner. These messy marks were once incidental to the artwork. Today they are considered evidence.

AI can produce an image in nano-seconds, then create hundreds of variations before a painter has mixed a color or cleaned a brush. Some of the results are technically bewildering and others inspire disbelief: How is this possible? Yet their abundance is changing our relationship to novelty. When nearly any visual idea can be summoned on demand, newness becomes easier to manufacture but harder to believe in. In an age of effortless images, the mess left behind by making something may become part of what makes it valuable.

So much recent visual culture can appear at once new and strangely familiar. Generative systems learn from immense archives of existing images, then assemble patterns according to statistical relationships. Their output can startle us, though the surprise often arrives cloaked in a recognizable visual fluency: the cinematic light, the dreamlike architecture, the glossy portrait or the eerily composed impossibility. After enough exposure, even the surreal can begin to feel conventional.

A study presented at the 2024 CHI Conference proffers one perspective about how this happens. Participants who used an AI image generator during a visual ideation exercise became more fixed on an initial example and produced fewer ideas, with less variety and originality, than those in the control group. The study involved only 60 people, so its findings should be treated cautiously, though they articulate something many artists and designers have begun to notice: a tool built to accelerate imagination can also narrow it by presenting a polished answer before a more difficult, original idea has had time to form.

Against this flood of frictionless imagery, fine art acquires another kind of presence. A physical artwork occupies time and holds emotion. An artist stood before it, considered it, changed it, ruined it, waited for it, and eventually decided to either finish or abandon it. All artwork contains a sequence of often messy choices that could have gone in any number of directions. The object becomes a record of attention, and attention is becoming one of the scarcest materials we have.

Researchers have already observed a version of this shift. Across six experiments involving 2,965 people, participants consistently valued art labeled “AI-made” less than work labeled “human-made,” even when the images themselves were identical. Awareness of the machine changed the perceived value of the human hand.

This preference extends beyond art. A 2015 study in the Journal of Marketing found that people considered handmade objects more attractive in part because they believed those objects symbolically contained the maker’s love. The participants were projecting on and responding to an imagined human presence embedded in the object, expressed through the perceived time and care required to make it.

Nostalgia is part of the current attraction to the handmade. We remember darkrooms, paste-up boards, paint-stained clothes, and the physical tools that digital technology has made unnecessary or irrelevant, and often forget the expense and tedium the processes demanded. Still, the renewed power of visible erasure or the pleasure of encountering an unrestrained line reaches beyond nostalgia. These marks allow us to envision the intent and the decisions behind them.

AI can attempt to imitate these marks. It can add a false thumbprint, invent pentimenti, reproduce a stray brush bristle, and generate an image that appears to have survived a century in an attic. But mess itself will soon prove very little. Provenance and an intelligible creative process will become more important as appearance ceases to represent authenticity.

In educated hands, AI can still become a profound artistic medium. Photography and digital tools have disrupted ideas about skill and authorship before becoming vehicles for extraordinary art. AI will be shaped by artists whose choices are specific enough to resist its defaults, and those artists may create work we cannot yet imagine. The presence of a tool has never settled the question of artistic value; the depth and consequence of the decisions made with it still matter.

We are entering a period in which polished images and endless variations are available on command. The works we retain or collect may be those that let us encounter another person’s limits: the place where control faltered or the artist had to surrender to something unresolved. 

I think our nostalgia for mess is growing from a hunger for evidence that making something still requires time, effort, commitment, and—dare I say it—love.

Everyone has a vision of the ultimate future, some picture of what the world looks like at its best (or worst), and whether that future is even reachable. In religious studies, we call this an “eschatology.” 

Eschatology isn’t just the Book of Revelation or the Rapture. The Greek meaning of eschaton is “last things,” and today the word captures the set of beliefs a person holds about where things are headed and what that implies for the present. 

You don’t have to be religious to have an eschatology. Political optimism is an eschatology, whatever side you’re on. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, thinks the future is something we build our way toward with free childcare and buses. Stephen Miller, one of the architects of the current immigration crackdown, thinks it’s something we had and lost, but can get back through sealing the border and mass deportations. Neither one just describes the future. Both are telling you what you’re obligated to do about it right now. In other words, your eschatology shapes your ethics, because what you believe is coming determines what you feel obligated to do today.

Silicon Valley has an eschatology too, and some of its leading figures have been pretty candid about what it is: AI surpasses humanity, humans become obsolete as a species, and what matters is making sure your version of AI is the one that wins. Understanding that vision as an eschatology, not just a business strategy, explains why some of the most powerful people alive seem so unbothered by what we seem to be losing—our attention spans, our critical thinking, our basic competence at things we used to just know how to do—and so uninterested in being accountable to anyone about it. 

Shades of Silicon Valley eschatology

To be sure, Silicon Valley CEOs each express their own flavor of this view of AI’s power.

Let’s start with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, because he was explicit about where he believes AI is going years before most people had even heard of a chatbot. In 2015, at a startup conference, he told the audience: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” This doomsday eschatology was the basis for his business plan: race to the top because extinction is coming. 

Since then, Altman’s views have shifted widely. “Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for me,” he wrote in an April 2026 blog post. “AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI, and we must figure out how to make it happen.” 

This is a very different eschatology and a very different business pitch: we must invest in AI because it will help humans do powerful things. 

And then there’s the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, whose life’s work makes sense once you see the eschatology underneath it. The OpenAI co-founder has said that human extinction is a very real threat that he’s personally trying to prevent. “If you think about the future of humanity, it’s going to fundamentally bifurcate in two directions,” he said back in 2013. “Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to be confined to one planet, until some eventual extinction event.” 

You could argue that SpaceX exists as insurance against that second path, a hedge against asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics, or an AI that decides to take us out. In this case, his eschatology is that salvation is possible if we can colonize space, but only for those who can get there. This may also be why he has said empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” As bleak as I may personally find this perspective, it is in line with his eschatology. After all, it is illogical to care for others when most of humanity won’t survive.

Since Musk made his now-famous 2013 remarks, he has continued his claims about an AI apocalypse. And during his recent high-profile lawsuit against Altman, OpenAI, and its president, Greg Brockman, for altering OpenAI’s original non-profit structure, Musk referred to his ominous eschatology once more. 

“The worst-case situation is where it is a terminator situation,” said Musk in April, “where AI will kill us all.” 

“We are not going to talk much about extinction in this case,” interrupted Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. “They got it, that’s enough.” 

By May, an Oakland jury unanimously dismissed Musk’s case. But based on his worldview, you could understand why Musk maintains that OpenAI should remain not-for-profit. OpenAI’s lawyers had another theory: maybe Musk is jealous of OpenAI’s financial success? 

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel has arguably taken eschatology the furthest. He’s taken to giving lectures arguing that the Antichrist of the 21st century is a “Luddite who wants to stop all science.” And he gives examples: AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and climate activist Greta Thunberg. In his framework, caution and regulation are the apocalyptic threat. This is perhaps why, when Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical this year to call for international AI oversight, Thiel said the Pope was effectively a “Chinese communist agent,” restraining America so that China can beat us in the technology arms race. That seems like a strange thing to say about a pope, until you realize in Thiel’s version of the future anyone suggesting limits is getting in the way.

What our eschatologies excuse 

Three tech leaders, three different pictures of humanity’s ultimate destiny—resignation, survivalism, apocalypticism. But I would assert that they share the same consequences. For one, in each version, the future isn’t something we build together. It’s something they get to build on our behalf. 

And notice who is left out of each version. Altman’s future has room for “great companies” and “expanding human capability,” but arguably less concern for the people whose jobs AI might make irrelevant in the process. Musk’s future may have some room for wealthy people who can book a seat on a colony ship but less for the rest of us. Thiel’s future has room for innovation, but little for those who want to question what we are innovating for and towards. In every case, the very people who have a stake in the future are not part of building that vision of that future.

This also helps explain why some tech bros seem so disinterested in philanthropy or profit-sharing. If you genuinely believe the human era is ending and something else is taking its place, it stands to reason you have no need to feel obligated to the people around you. Why invest in public health, or housing, or building a robust civil society, if the relevant future doesn’t include most of the people who’d benefit? Why fund a school, or fix a subway, or pay taxes toward anything you won’t personally need in twenty years? This eschatology doesn’t just fail to produce ethics. It actively excuses their absence. Empathy stops looking like a virtue and starts looking like a waste of resources on people who, in this version of the future, don’t really count.

And this is where the theology does its real work: it doesn’t just predict the future, it shapes what futures are possible by dictating actions today. If humanity’s time is about to expire regardless of what anyone does, then choosing not to help others doesn’t feel like a moral failure. It feels like realism. That’s the result of every eschatology like these: it allows cruelty to feel like an accurate read of the situation rather than a choice.

What makes this eschatology dangerous is that it is held by the people with the most resources to act on it. Musk, Altman, and Thiel aren’t theologians speculating about the end times. They’re building the thing their theology tells them is coming, funding the politics that protects their ability to build it, and treating anyone who asks them to slow down as a luddite or Antichrist rather than a citizen with a legitimate concern. A belief that the present doesn’t matter, held by people with the power to shape it, doesn’t stay a belief. It becomes policy, product, and precedent, with tech bros deciding the future on behalf of everyone else, without anyone else’s consent.

Volodymyr Zelensky may be under pressure to hold elections in Ukraine, including from his former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, but in remarks over the weekend, the Ukrainian President argued that doing so during the ongoing conflict with Russia would “destroy” the country.

“I believe that in a war like this, elections as such are a huge risk,” Zelensky said in remarks to journalists during a two-hour meeting Saturday—parts of which were made public on Sunday. “Elections right now are a tsunami for the country that will split Ukraine.”

Read More: Zelensky Faces Pressure to Hold Elections. What Stands in the Way?

The renewed push for wartime elections was bolstered by Fedorov, who, in a video posted to social media last week, argued that  "democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia.” Zelensky fired Fedorov, once his longtime ally, in July over disagreements in how to run the war with Russia.

“I believe that if we want to destroy the country, then during such a war we can move towards elections,” Zelensky said. 

Fedorov’s call for elections is the latest leadership test for Zelensky, whose five-year term expired in May 2024 but continues under wartime rules. Elections are suspended under martial law. 

Zelensky recently fired a top aide amid a growing corruption scandal involving members of his office. Zelensky himself has not been implicated, but it has added to his political woes.

For the first time with journalists, Zelensky addressed the ongoing controversy involving Fedorov on Saturday, claiming that the former defense minister’s actions were misguided. 

Zelensky added that “there can be no conflict at such a level between leaders,” referring to Fedorov's conflict with the former Armed Forces commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky. Zelensky also replaced Syrsky last month after Fedorov’s removal spurred massive protests within the military and on the streets of Kyiv.

Syrsky was widely viewed as part of the old guard, while Fedorov had pushed for the adoption of modern warfare technology, including drones.

“I really had and still have a very positive attitude towards Mykhailo [Fedorov],” he said, according to local news outlet Interfax. “We’ve been through a lot together. But I think that he himself is going—or he's being pushed—into the wrong things.”

In a post on X, Zelensky also mentioned that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense was under severe strain with a $27 billion shortfall. 

“At the beginning of the year, decisions were made at the Ministry to use in the first half of the year funds that were intended to be disbursed in the second half, and that money went toward drone production and other needs,” Zelensky posted. “Now, in the second half of the year, those funds need to be compensated for and supplemented.”

Zelensky discussed the defense budget deficit during a summit with Nordic and Baltic leaders in Kyiv on Sunday, where the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden agreed to continue to provide military and financial support. 

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is set to visit Ukraine Monday, in his first international visit. 

“Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve. We will not back down until there is a just and lasting peace,” Burnham said in a statement Monday.

Successive polls have shown a lack of public interest in holding elections during the war. The latest, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology from July 20 to Aug. 3, shows that 57% of Ukrainians believe elections should be held after fighting has ended, down from 69% in March. Experts have previously said that the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin launched in 2022, nixed the possibility of holding safe and secure elections in Ukraine. 

Zelensky has denied postponing the polls to cling to power, and told reporters on Saturday that holding elections “is impossible under the conditions we have now, when Putin does not want to accept any ceasefire options.”

In the same conversation, Zelensky said he believes Russia will draft an additional 300,000 troops to fight in Ukraine after Russian parliamentary elections, which are scheduled on Sept. 18-20.

Zelensky said Russia could also draft more ​troops in 2027. He expects most of the additional forces to be deployed in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, where military clashes are ongoing.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) on Friday issued a 95-page final rule that it plans to implement immediately if the government obtains relief from two existing injunctions. It would require USPS employees to verify that outbound federal ballot mailings comply with new envelope, barcode, and data-reporting requirements before accepting them from election officials.

The rule was designed to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order from March 31. It directs the Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Social Security Administration, to compile and send lists of adult citizens in each state. Separately, it directs USPS to establish state-specific lists of people to whom election officials intend to send mail-in or absentee ballots, along with unique ballot-envelope identifiers.

A ​pair of court ‌orders blocks the rule from implementing the rule before midterm elections in November.

Read More: Trump’s Order Restricting Mail-In Voting Rebuked by States

About the two injunctions blocking Trump’s mail-in voting order 

Two injunctions bar USPS from implementing its new rule. They were issued by Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani on June 25 and Aug. 11.  

What the June Injunction Covers

A coalition of 23 states, along with the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit on April 3 seeking to block Trump’s executive order, arguing that the President does not have the authority to dictate state voting practices. 

In June, the presiding judge granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs, finding two sections of the order unlawful and constitutionally invalid. It barred federal agencies from implementing those sections against plaintiff states and D.C. for elections held on or before Nov. 3. It also blocked USPS from refusing to transmit ballots based on whether voters appeared on the new state-specific lists.

What the August Injunction Covers

Voting-rights groups brought a separate lawsuit against the Trump Administration on April 2, claiming the executive order was unconstitutional, “dangerous,” and could disenfranchise eligible voters. It resulted in the August injunction, which bars USPS from implementing, enforcing, or giving effect to the executive order’s mail-voting provisions for any elections ahead of or on Nov. 3. It also prohibits USPS from completing the specified rulemaking for those elections.

Talwani wrote that the executive order was “causing confusion and threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy.” She also concluded that “the executive branch has no authority to regulate elections.”

Critics of the executive order have echoed that concern, saying that the Trump Administration is looking to force federal oversight on elections even though the duty is  enshrined to states and Congress in the Constitution. 

“Yesterday’s new mail-in voting rule is an attempt to weaponize USPS as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to take over elections,” Michael McNulty, the senior policy director for government-reform nonprofit Issue One, said in a statement Saturday. 

McNulty argues that the rule would shift postal workers “from neutral transporters of a state-led process to a federal gatekeeper of states’ outbound mail ballots.”

However, the USPS has asserted in the final rule that the requirements “do not amount to election administration, nor do they usurp state resources.”

“Rather, they regulate the use of the mail to improve operational efficiency and support the faithful execution of federal law,” it says within the rule.

Voting-rights groups challenge the USPS mail-in ballot rule

A coalition of voting-rights organizations has filed an emergency motion asking the federal district court to enforce its Aug. 11 injunction against USPS. The plaintiffs argue that issuing an immediately effective final rule, intended for possible use in November, violated the injunction.

USPS acknowledged that it would not implement the final rule for the 2026 election unless the government obtains relief from both injunctions. However, the coalition argued that USPS issued the rule in violation of the Aug. 11 injunction, without seeking a stay or filing an appeal.

It also said that USPS could have given the rule an effective date that falls after the 2026 midterms without violating the injunction, while the “immediate” effective date could sow “chaos” and “confusion” ahead of November. 

“Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November,” said a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs, which includes the League of Women Voters, Association of Americans Resident Overseas, and the U.S. Vote Foundation. 

Postmaster General David Steiner defended the rule when it was proposed in June, saying at a Senate hearing that he “would think that states would want the information to ensure that the ballots that they think they’re sending out are the ballots that are actually getting sent out.”

TIME has reached out to USPS for comment.

In late July, the Trump Administration asked the Supreme Court to stay the June 25 injunction while its appeal proceeds. After Talwani issued the Aug. 11 injunction, the Administration urged the justices to address that second order as well through the pending proceeding—an approach the plaintiff states opposed. 

But unless the Aug. 11 injunction is separately stayed or lifted, or the Supreme Court expressly addresses it, it continues to bar USPS from implementing its new rule for the midterm elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to continue construction on a new White House ballroom with a temporary stay issued Friday—just before the aboveground portion of the project was about to be halted.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in a one-sentence order, stayed a federal district court judge’s injunction that barred further development. The move gives the full Supreme Court more time to consider the Trump Administration’s request to keep the injunction on hold while it seeks further review. However, there is no established timeline for when Roberts or the Court might take further action. 

The ruling comes after months of debate over a legal challenge brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which argues that a President cannot unilaterally make a major, permanent change to federally owned property when Congress has not authorized it, pointing toward the Property Clause of the Constitution.

“We reiterated that the Administration has no unilateral legal authority—constitutional, statutory, or otherwise—to build a Ballroom on the site of the now-demolished East Wing, unless and until Congress expressly approves,” the National Trust for Historic Preservation said in a statement last week. “Each court that has reviewed this case has agreed with the National Trust. We hope the Supreme Court will uphold the rule of law by stopping this illegal project.”

Read More: What to Know About Trump’s Aide Natalie Harp

Trump reacted to the administrative stay on Truth Social on Friday, praising both the Supreme Court and Roberts, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2005. 

“We are grateful for the Decision of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump said. “The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!”

Here’s what to know about the latest updates on the $400 million project.

How did the ballroom case reach the Supreme Court?

Two lower-court decisions brought the dispute before the Supreme Court.

First, Senior Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that the National Trust was likely to succeed on its claim that the project required congressional approval, and he ruled in March that construction on the aboveground ballroom could not take place while litigation continued. He modified that preliminary injunction on April 16 to clarify that security-related work could continue if it is "strictly necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House.”

The second decision came when the Trump Administration appealed, and a D.C. Circuit panel upheld the modified injunction. In its August ruling, it said that each President is a “temporary tenant, not the owner,” of the White House.

According to Kimberly Wehle, professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, the injunction is meant to ensure that the project does not advance while the courts review its legality, the limits of presidential authority, and whether it might cause irreparable harm. 

“The court is saying, ‘We just need to stop the bleeding right now, because if this continues, it'll just cause more harm,’” she tells TIME. 

The Trump Administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene through an emergency application, which is meant for urgent review of time-sensitive matters that fall outside of the typically months- or years-long case review timeline for the country’s highest court.

The case was put in front of Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals filed in the D.C. Circuit. 

That led to the administrative stay—a short-term order that freezes a lower court decision or deadline in order to buy time for a bench to review an emergency request. An administrative stay does not reflect a case’s merits or legality; it acts as an interim measure for a future ruling from Roberts or the Court.

In this case, it paused the preliminary injunction originally handed down by Leon. Therefore, the stop-work order was put aside for the time being, allowing construction to continue. 

"We are aware of the administrative stay," the National Trust tells TIME, in response to the latest developments. "To be clear, this is not a final decision on the merits of the government’s stay application, and we await further action.”

No court has issued a final ruling on the project’s legality. But next steps will likely include determining whether the renovation is two distinct projects—aboveground and below—or a singular build. 

Is Trump building a ballroom or a military complex?

Trump’s 90,000-square-foot construction project comprises a luxury ballroom—which is meant to host 650 seated guests—with an underground military complex beneath it, featuring “protective missile resistant steel columns, beams, drone proof roofing materials, and bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass,” according to one court document. 

Lower courts treated the two components separately, finding that the National Trust was likely to establish that the aboveground ballroom required congressional approval while exempting underground security construction from the injunction.

In making his injunction determination, Leon said: “Defendants themselves distinguished between below-ground and above-ground construction, stating that ‘the below-surface work is driven by national security concerns independent of the above-grade construction.’” 

Leon and the D.C. Circuit said the Administration had shifted from treating the components as independent to describing them as inseparable. The Administration disputes that characterization, saying the design became less flexible as construction progressed. It now argues that the entire project is integrated and that halting the aboveground work would compromise its structural integrity and security functions.

“Every day the President does not have access to the vital security features of the military complex presents unacceptable risk, no matter how long the Project takes to complete,” Solicitor General John Sauer argued in court filings last week. “Built with integrated engineering, the Project will provide in a very large way, a ‘safe room’ for the Presidency and the continuity of government.”

Presidents in the past have relied on the White House’s Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), which dates to World War II, as a safe room or bunker. The Administration has argued that the former East Wing’s security infrastructure had become vulnerable to modern threats, including drones and missiles, making the new construction urgent. 

In court documents, it claimed the former building “cannot protect guests against inclement weather, let alone high-powered weapons.” 

The White House in August shared AI-generated images of drones, military personnel, and vehicles on the roof of the ballroom. Trump has claimed that a “drone port” will feature a launching deck and defense station. 

He told reporters in March on Air Force One that the ballroom would become a “shed for what’s being built under” and that it would have its own security features, such as bulletproof glass.

Whether or not the two components are accepted as a single entity, from a legal standpoint, could determine the outcome of the outstanding emergency relief. 

Could construction outrun judicial review?

In Trump’s post on social media Friday, he said that construction of the ballroom “is under budget and ahead of schedule.”

The Administration claimed in its Aug. 13 application that 65% of construction was done. When the project was announced in 2025, the White House said that construction would be done “long before the end of President Trump’s term.” The Administration is now saying that the framework will be substantially complete by November, with the official completion date set for August 2028, according to appendixes to the emergency application that was submitted by the Trump Administration.

This raises the question of whether a majority of the structure could be completed before the litigation is resolved.

Lawyers for the National Trust accused the Trump Administration in a court filing earlier this month of “trying to outrun judicial review,” pointing to the Administration’s own assertion that the structure will soon be “virtually impossible to deconstruct.”

Wehle says that Roberts’s stay is “giving Trump exactly what he wants” by allowing him to get ever closer to the project’s completion while the courts assess whether he is breaking the law.

“This is the Supreme Court greenlighting unconstitutional, lawless behavior by the President,” Wehle says. She questions whether the President is being accommodated because it seemed like the project had gone too far and might be harder to undo at this point than to simply finish—especially when weighing the potential harm to the public in terms of cost, damage, and timeline.

But if that’s true, she asks, “What kind of precedent does that set?”

“That is a precedent that says the law is optional,” she explains. That could embolden a strategy of acting first and asking permission second, if at all. 

If the project were ultimately found unlawful after construction was substantially or entirely complete, the case could present unusual questions about what remedy remained available—including whether a court could order the structure altered, reverted, or removed.

Today, if you wish, you can go get a staggering amount of granular data about your health without your doctor’s involvement. All on your own, you can get an MRI of your entire body, a CT of your coronary calcium, an ultrasound of your blood vessels, and maybe someday an immersion ultrasound in a spa. 

Direct-to-consumer medical imaging tests are a huge and growing business worth billions of dollars. Over 100,000 Americans are already customers. But do these test results actually make us healthier? 

As a radiologist, a doctor specialized in the alchemy of turning information into health, I  translate data hidden in images into words that motivate behavior to promote healthier, longer lives. Because it is central to what we do, radiologists have grappled for decades with the question of whether and how information improves health. It turns out to be surprisingly complicated. 

In order to make a difference in someone’s health, the test must accurately predict or diagnose a condition, resulting in a change in mindset and behavior, and that change in mindset and behavior must produce a better outcome than not doing the test. 

For example, whole-body MRI of the general public, a test not recommended by any medical guideline, medical society, or payer, creates information by taking a picture of your body. That information is accurate for some diseases but not others. It might change your mind by finding something you didn’t know about, like a small mass in your kidney or thyroid gland, which then might change what you or your doctor does. For example, your doctor might order another test to better understand if the mass is important or perform surgery to take it out. 

This seems logical. But the reason whole-body MRI of the general public isn’t recommended while other screening tests are is because in the absence of evidence, it is believed to be unlikely to produce a better outcome than doing nothing at all.

Many people think, as I once did, that early diagnosis always improves health. That logic is especially intuitive for an early diagnosis of cancer. But in many cases, that intuition, however understandable, can be wrong. Finding something with a diagnostic test might not help, despite creating an illusion that it does.

For both examples I gave—small thyroid masses, small kidney masses—it has been well documented that aggressive efforts to treat them, despite many being cancer, does not help most people. Isn’t that strange? Yet despite ourselves, we keep finding and removing them.

That’s the tricky thing with diagnostic tests. It’s terrifically hard to unsee something. For those who receive no benefit from treatment, only secondary harm results: surgical pain and complications, the anxiety of a scary diagnosis, and financial burden. 

There are numerous non-intuitive examples like this in which only in retrospect do we realize patients have been harmed because a diagnostic test and its downstream actions were promoted to millions before confirming things worked as intended. This is why scientists and medical professionals are so obsessive about evidence and statistics. It’s really hard to know if something is hurting or helping if we rely on common sense.

The likelihood of benefit and the likelihood of harm matter tremendously. For example, if whole-body MRI is performed on a high-risk patient with a cancer-causing genetic syndrome, it is much more likely to create health benefits than if it were to be performed in the general population. This is one of the paradoxical things about diagnostic tests. It’s not just about test accuracy. Equally important is the people being tested, because baseline risk strongly influences the benefits.

Harm is often caused not by the test itself, but from actions taken to manage the information of unknown significance it produces. It is in this way that a seemingly harmless test can hurt people. We do tests to find things, and when we find things, we commonly act, even when we shouldn’t, because we aren’t rational decision-makers. 

Direct-to-consumer testing will change how medicine is practiced. It empowers us to make personal decisions about our health and generates novel, complex information that will unlock scientific breakthroughs. 

When buying one of these tests, we should pay attention to what the company is claiming. Is their test a curiosity, an entertainment product, a research tool, or clinical care? The lines are often intentionally blurry. 

The need for scientific support, informed disclosure, and regulatory compliance increases as the test moves from curiosity toward clinical care. If the test has only been shown to provide information or to make a diagnosis, or has only been shown to improve health in patients with specific risk factors different from our own, we should be skeptical. As they say, buyer beware.

Many companies encourage us to assume their test improves our health. In such cases, the information we are buying may help us, hurt us, or be a placebo and do nothing at all.

Trade talks between the United States and Canada collapsed Friday. With President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs taking effect the following day, Prime Minister Mark Carney quickly responded with retaliatory measures that go into effect in September.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent out guidance for importers saying that the tariffs, which Trump first announced last month, would go into effect Saturday. They impact about $20 billion of Canadian goods, including hockey sticks, building materials, clothing, beer, and cheese. 

Negotiators from both countries had worked for weeks to reach a trade deal, leading up to a three-day extension of the original tariff deadline. At the time, Trump suggested that an agreement had been reached, writing on Truth Social on Tuesday that he had “paused” the tariffs because the two countries “have a DEAL!”

But in a statement just before midnight on Friday, Carney said that “progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians.”

Read more: Trump Imposes 50% Tariff Hike on Canadian Goods

“As a result, this evening, I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S. and have directed Canada’s negotiators to return to Ottawa,” the Prime Minister said. He accused the Trump Administration of introducing last-minute changes to the deal that he said were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” 

Following the collapse of the negotiations, Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday and said that Canada “wants the benefits of being a State, without being one” and that it has “also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!”

It’s unclear what Trump meant in his latest tirade, though the U.S. President has previously floated the idea of making Canada the U.S.’s 51st state.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on social media on Saturday that Canada had “declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week.”

“New demands and walk backs of other commitments by Canada have upended the careful balance reached in the past days,” Greer said. “This is a missed opportunity for Canada to partner with the United States.”

Carney vowed that the tariffs would not go unanswered. Speaking at a news conference Saturday, he announced dollar-for-dollar tariffs on U.S. goods.

“We ⁠cannot ​accept what they have offered, and ​we will not give what they have asked,” he said.

The retaliatory tariffs will touch U.S. sectors including steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics, and they will go into effect Sept. 8.

The growing rift between the U.S. and Canada

Polling conducted before the talks collapsed suggests that most Canadians supported taking a hard line in negotiations with the U.S.

An Angus Reid Institute poll from July found that 65% of Canadians say that their government should approach the U.S. either cautiously, as a potential threat, or as an enemy.

Reflecting similar sentiments, a Léger poll from this month showed that 56% of Canadian respondents want the federal government to make no further concessions to Washington in ongoing trade and tariff negotiations—compared to 31% who favor flexibility.

While the new import taxes will only apply to about 5% of what Canada ships to the U.S. each year, the breakdown in negotiations further fractures an already strained relationship between the two countries and their leaders.
Trump and Carney have taken swipes at each other since the U.S. President returned to office last January. 

After an article claimed that the country was in a “technical recession” this summer, Trump revived his call to make Canada the 51st state in the U.S.

Carney then mocked Trump at a housing policy event in Toronto on Aug. 5 when his teleprompter stopped working.

“Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy,” Carney told reporters, referencing Trump's claims of “sabotage” after a teleprompter malfunctioned during his address at the United Nations General Assembly last September.

Later that day, Trump called Canada’s leadership “nasty” during an event at Red Rock Casino Resort in Las Vegas as trade negotiations were ongoing.

"Yes, it's a tough negotiation,” Carney said in response. “You can change the adjective and say 'nasty,' but for ​Canada it's ​a question ⁠of Canadian jobs, it's a question of the future of Canadian enterprises.”

With negotiations suspended and matching tariffs on the way, the rift has moved beyond rhetoric into a widening trade war.

Imagine that someone you love starts turning down opportunities to attend social gatherings like going to the movies, picnics, and parties. Then this person stops responding consistently to your texts, avoids eye contact when you do get together, and seems to be losing their energy or spark. They have trouble keeping up with daily routines and talk a lot about physical struggles such as headaches and stomach aches. Something doesn’t feel right to you, but you’re not sure what is happening or what to do. Imagine now if the person all these things are happening to is you. 

Nearly one in seven people worldwide have a mental-health disorder. With the prevalence of mental disorders so high, odds are we all know and love someone who is struggling. But most of us have limited understanding of mental health, and sometimes misguided or inaccurate knowledge. If we improve our understanding, this could help us better identify when we are in distress and get the help we need. It can also potentially assist us in helping friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers. As a psychologist, I believe we could all benefit from increased mental-health literacy.

The concept of mental-health literacy was first coined in the mid-1990s by a group of Australian researchers who began a series of studies to understand the public’s knowledge about mental health. Since then, extensive research on mental-health literacy has taken place in the U.S., Australia, Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and elsewhere. 

Data from 16 studies indicate two major trends in public awareness about mental health. First, we’re making some headway in recognizing that mental disorders often have some biological underpinnings. Second, there seems to be more acceptance of professional help for such difficulties. But it’s not nearly enough.

Finding sound mental-health information can be challenging. The Internet has the potential to increase our access to evidence-informed knowledge and decrease unmet mental health needs, but there’s too much noise. And a lot of information online is of inadequate quality and lacks scientific evaluation. Rather than helping, random Internet searches on mental health could harm people most in need. 

One way to further increase our mental health literacy is to take the free online Mental Health First Aid course. This could help us gain knowledge on how to recognize when a disorder is developing and provide information on help-seeking options and available treatments. 

One of the best resources for evidence-based information is the National Institute of Mental Health. Established in 1949, this is one of the world’s largest research organizations funding brain and behavior research. It offers valuable online public resources including signs and symptoms of a broad range of disorders including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and ADHD. It also provides information on the latest and best treatments and how to find a mental-health provider. Another accurate and up-to-date source is the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the largest grassroots mental-health organization in the U.S. They too offer research informed information online on how to find support including a helpline.

While mental-health literacy is everybody’s business, there are limits to the appropriate use of such information, particularly in our offers to help others. Let’s take the example of problematic drinking. It’s good to be able to recognize our own or a family member’s struggles with alcohol. But there are differences in providing someone with encouragement and assistance in getting help and respecting their boundaries if they refuse or are uninterested. Mental-health literacy can help us distinguish the best way to approach issues like these. 

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

It may be both the most prestigious and the most frustrating job in international diplomacy: members of the United Nations are weighing who should succeed António Guterres as Secretary-General when he completes his final term in December. The timing couldn’t be more critical, with U.N.’s fortunes at a historically low ebb, for reasons both political and financial.

Indeed, U.N. insiders question why anyone would even want the job at such a testing—and turbulent—moment. Some predict that, with major powers repeatedly blocking the U.N. from intervening in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar, and with the U.S. rolling back funding, whoever succeeds Guterres will simply have to continue to do “less with less” and manage a process of institutional decline as gracefully as possible. Others still hold out hope that a new U.N. leader could reverse the slide, and persuade powers large and small to invest in the organization.

Yet, at a time when global challenges—wars, epidemics, and climate change—continue to proliferate, there is a compelling case for preserving the U.N. as a space for global deal making. Doing so will require a Secretary-General of formidable political skills, capable of persuading world leaders to listen.

It is a question of balancing two competing imperatives. The U.N. is an organization that rests on international cooperation, but the current global moment is one of international competition. The challenge facing the next Secretary-General is to explain how the U.N. can stay relevant. This is no time to preach the virtues of solidarity among nations. It is necessary to meet governments “where they’re at,” as psychologists say, and accept their rifts are real. A shrewd leader of the U.N. could find ways to help states de-escalate conflicts and cooperate on global challenges out of necessity, not idealism.

Ultimately, if political leaders do not believe that the U.N., which was founded in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” can live up to that founding goal, they are less likely to take it seriously as an authority on other international issues such as Artificial Intelligence or economic cooperation. Making sure that doesn’t happen will be the central challenge for the organization’s next leader. Perhaps each nomination should thus come with a warning: Caveat emptor, or buyer beware. 

Our tumultuous present

Maybe the biggest challenge for the next Secretary General lies inside the cavernous chamber that houses the Security Council, the organization’s most powerful body. The five permanent, veto power-wielding members—the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France—that dominate the council have repeatedly blocked intervention in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar. The Biden Administration’s repeated refusal to support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza at the U.N. in 2023 and 2024 stirred deep resentment across the organization.

Most member states still pay homage to the U.N. Charter and its prohibition against aggression. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. decision to attack Iran in February suggest that some of the security council’s most powerful members no longer feel bound by its guiding principles. If the U.N.'s political situation is its main headache, its financial positions is a close second.

After the Trump Administration cut off the bulk of U.S. funding for its operations in 2025, U.N. officials have been spending a lot of their time wondering about how to pay the bills. The U.S. is supposed to cover about a fifth of the organization’s core costs and a quarter of the budget for its blue helmet peace operations, which add up to roughly $8.5 billion this year. Washington was already behind on its dues when Trump returned to office, and currently owes the U.N. about $4 billion. The U.S also previously covered roughly a third of the separate budgets for the organization’s big relief agencies—such as the World Food Programme—which need tens of billions of dollars to feed, vaccinate and shelter vulnerable people each year.

Other traditional donors, including European governments, are scaling back spending on development and humanitarian aid. Potential alternatives have not stepped in to close the financial gap. China is now on the hook for almost as much of the U.N.’s core and peacekeeping budgets as the U.S., but is often slow to stump up its annual contributions. Beijing also contributes very little to the humanitarian sector. While the Trump Administration has released some funds for the U.N.’s life-saving efforts this year, big relief agencies have been forced to cut back life-saving assistance to civilians in places like South Sudan and Afghanistan.

This is a markedly different landscape from the one António Guterres encountered in 2017, when the former Portuguese prime minister became Secretary-General. At that time, the U.N. members had just agreed to the Paris climate accord and a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, including a pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. Geopolitical storm clouds were gathering—the Security Council was fiercely divided over the war in Syria—and Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 elections, coming soon after Guterres’s selection, signaled trouble ahead. Still, for believers in multilateral processes, a broad agenda for international cooperation appeared to be in place, and the Secretary-General’s task was to turn it into reality.

That brief moment of optimism proved ephemeral. Guterres spent a large part of his first term trying, with some success, to keeping Trump at bay. Nonetheless rising tensions among major powers, and disputes over how to finance development projects and support poorer states’ climate change adaptation efforts, have eroded governments’ trust in one another, and their faith in the U.N.’s complex, negotiation-based approach to addressing their national interests. Guterres has spoken eloquently about the risks of international fragmentation, and has pushed U.N. members to work together on emerging challenges, such as the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But he has struggled to get leaders to focus consistently on that agenda. Increasingly, many governments are turning instead to smaller, looser decision-making clubs—such as the Group of 7, a Western club, or the BRICS, the bloc of emerging market nations—rather than the U.N. itself.

Diplomats and U.N. officials also fault Guterres for taking a low-key role in crisis management, despite major conflicts exploding on his watch. The Secretary-General has been blunt about his lack of leverage to mediate in most of today’s conflicts, and has encouraged a culture of caution among his senior staff dealing with political affairs and peace operations. Although he was involved in one notable mediation success—the 2022 Black Sea Grain initiative—many U.N. members feel that his reluctance to engage in broader peace efforts has undermined the body’s credibility.

Runners and riders

Such critiques of the incumbent, and the manifold challenges facing the office of the Secretary General, haven’t deterred a clutch of candidates from around the world—who may yet be joined by new competitors as the race to succeed Guterres enters its final stretch. 

Eight candidates are currently jostling to replace him and assume the reins of what U.N. watchers sometimes call “the parliament of man.” Among the most widely discussed are Rafael Grossi, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Rebeca Grynspan, a senior U.N. trade official and former vice president of Costa Rica. Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s ambassador to the U.N., is also a popular candidate among her colleagues in New York. But because there is no official cut-off point for new candidates to enter the race, and many diplomats expect more challengers to emerge, especially if none of the existing crop looks like a clear winner.

While the current candidates have been speaking at public events from Europe to Korea, they have struck a cautious tone regarding their plans for the U.N. This reflects the way the selection process works. The Security Council—where the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K. hold vetoes—is central to the process, vetting candidates and recommending one to the General Assembly, where all U.N. members have seats, for approval. To date, the Assembly has always ratified the recommendation. Anyone who wants to be Secretary-General must avoid offending the five veto powers.

Talking about what is wrong with the world today without irritating at least one of the major powers is quite hard. Guterres angered Russia by criticizing its war in Ukraine, and Moscow is likely looking for a pliable U.N. chief. The biggest headache for Guterres’s successor will be maintaining working relations with Washington in the remaining years of the Trump presidency. Senior U.N. officials worry that, having imposed severe economic strain on the organization, the U.S. will insist that the next Secretary-General make deep cuts to U.N. agencies and follow the Trump Administration’s agenda on questions such as diversity, and soft-pedal criticism of Israeli actions against the Palestinians.

Tiptoeing around these sensitivities, the eight candidates for the Secretary-General position agree that the U.N. is in poor shape. All have promised to concentrate on preventive diplomacy, and have committed to managing the organization efficiently. None has so far set out a groundbreaking strategy for putting the U.N. back on its feet. If this is partly a matter of political tact, it also reflects the fact that the U.N. Secretary-General, despite being the public face of the organization, has only limited power to shape the organization. While the veto powers dominate the Security Council, a sprawling array of intergovernmental committees and boards—including dozens of entities dealing with issues from telecommunications to the environment—oversee the wider work of the U.N. system.

The Secretary-General and his or her advisers must barter with U.N. members over remarkably minor budgetary matters, down to the number of mid-level and junior staff employed in U.N. offices. It is easy to call on the U.N.’s top official to focus on problems of world order, but bureaucracy gets in the way. 

Once in office, the next U.N. chief will have to manage these institutional issues while also laying a broader agenda. She or he could address this challenge by appointing a powerful chief of staff to handle administrative matters, freeing up more time to prioritize diplomacy.

On the diplomatic front, the incoming leader’s priority will be to demonstrate the ability to insert himself or herself into one or more conflicts, signaling a shift from the Guterres era. This is easier said than done. Conflict prevention and peacemaking have become crowded fields, with a growing number of middle powers, and at times the Trump Administration, leading peace processes that the U.N. might once have overseen. 

The next Secretary-General will not simply be able to fly into trouble spots and cajole warring parties into making deals. But he or she can use the first months in office to shuttle between key capitals in regions such as the Middle East, looking for opportunities to engage, and encouraging U.N. staff—who still have considerable expertise on issues like mediation and peacekeeping operations—to table new options for dealing with ongoing or looming conflicts. This is not likely to produce quick or major wins, and there is always a risk that the U.N. will launch peace initiatives that fail. But as a European diplomat familiar with the U.N. once put it, everyone expects the U.N. to fail, and as a result it can do so without sustaining reputational damage. 

The greater danger for the institution right now is that it fails to engage in meaningful crisis diplomacy at all, cementing the impression that it is no longer a significant peacemaking force. If the Secretary-General can use this kind of early outreach to gain a place on the diplomatic map, she or he will still face the challenge of articulating what the U.N. stands for in a divided world.

Collective action in a world divided

There is no shortage of good arguments for why collective action helps address problems that transcend borders. These often get lost at a time when the predominant political narratives center on national divisions and differences.

U.N. officials do not help themselves by couching their arguments in technocratic terms, weighed down with talk of goals and policy frameworks. But the underlying political challenge is to make a case for multilateralism that resonates with decision-makers who view international affairs in zero-sum, or at least very low-trust, terms.

The best approach may be to frame the U.N. as a sort of global risk reduction organization. Over the last decade, governments, the private sector and the public have seen the knock-on effects of both the pandemic and regional conflicts causing global economic disruption. New technologies are creating further economic shocks and could make future conflicts more dangerous.

The U.N. is not a global authority with the powers to halt these trends. But it is a space in which governments can discuss the risks involved and—where they see common ground—explore steps to mitigate them. Even though it may be easier for states to meet in smaller clubs such as the BRICS and G7, the U.N.’s advantage is that it remains a neutral space where different blocs of governments can engage in dialogue.

The next Secretary-General can only encourage rivalrous states to take part in these dialogues, and will need to do so with a light touch. In the past, the U.N. has sometimes responded to new challenges by announcing new agencies and funds to address them. The resulting multilateral bloat has become hard to sustain financially and defend politically. The incoming U.N. leadership will need to show that it can facilitate discussions of difficult global problems without adding new layers of bureaucracy.

The role of the Secretary-General is perhaps to be both the world’s most prominent event organizer—bringing governments and other actors into the room to talk about their problems—and a sort of political therapist for world leaders. If the Secretary-General can win the trust of these leaders, and persuade them to work on common problems despite their divisions, he or she may be able to bring a degree of stability to a dangerous international environment. In doing so, she or he can also keep some political space open for the U.N. to do its most basic work, getting help to the suffering, mitigating the effects of suffering and – at its best – giving small states and civil society groups a rare platform to speak out on issues like human rights and climate change.

The new leader of the U.N. cannot heal all the world’s divisions, but with courage and political acumen, the Secretary-General can make international disputes a little less toxic. That may be a limited vision of what the U.N., sometimes dubbed the “parliament of man” is for.  But in an era of multiplying dangers and distrust, it is a noble and perhaps essential one.

The Pentagon has fired the editor-in-chief and publisher of the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

On Friday, the Pentagon provided separation notices to editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and publisher Max Lederer, CBS News reported. The notices said that the two had five days to appeal the decision, according to CBS.

Slavin told The Associated Press that he was dismissed for insubordination “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” In July, CBS published a story featuring an interview with Slavin, in which he stressed the importance of the newspaper’s independence.

“We need to be able to provide independent news to service members,” he told CBS. “If we can’t do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that's the foxhole.”

While Stars and Stripes receives part of its funding from the Pentagon, it has a years-long history of being editorially independent. In January, though, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the Department of Defense “is returning Stars & Stripes to its original mission” and is “bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century.”

“We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members,” he said in a post on X in January.

In March, more details about the department’s “modernization” overhaul for Stars and Stripes were revealed by an internal memo, which included a provision that content published by the newspaper must be aligned with “good order and discipline,” a phrase that is in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

News of the firings also comes after Lederer announced on Tuesday that he plans to retire, effective Sept. 30. Lederer, who has been publisher of the newspaper for nearly two decades, said that he came to the decision after he realized that his “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” diverged in “fundamental ways” from the Pentagon’s plans for the newspaper. He said he disagreed with parts of the modernization plan revealed in March, including the Pentagon’s desire to transition all print products to digital; Lederer said he worried that the move would affect the accessibility of Stars and Stripes for some service members.

“I think the right step is for me to step down, get out of the way, and let different leadership step in and continue to make this, the great organization that it is, even better,” Lederer told Stars and Stripes.

In April, the Department of Defense fired the newspaper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith. As ombudsman, Smith was tasked with ensuring the organization’s editorial independence. Smith told her colleagues in a message at the time, which was seen by The Washington Post, that the Pentagon didn’t provide a reason for her firing, but that she believed the decision came down because she criticized the agency’s moves to overhaul the newspaper.

“I knew it was risky to speak out, but my responsibility to Stripes and the First Amendment was paramount,” she wrote in her message to her colleagues, according to the Post.

In June, Smith filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Department of Defense, in which she alleged that her firing was retaliatory and a violation of her First Amendment rights.

The warnings from meteorologists have been growing slowly but steadily in recent months: the most severe El Niño on record may be coming soon. Record-breaking temperatures and a slew of extreme weather events are likely to follow.

For companies and investors, alarm bells are already sounding. Hundreds of publicly traded companies—particularly in the food and chemicals sectors—have used earnings calls in recent months to outline their contingency planning. And banks have warned about the possibility of a supply shock that drives up prices as extreme weather disrupts production chains. 

In other words, the potential effects of El Niño over the coming year are both local and specific to companies and their operations, and cumulative across the economy.  

Unlike many phenomena in our climate-changed world, El Niño isn’t new or unfamiliar to most decision makers. Past cycles in the 1970s and 1990s have wrought enough damage that supply chain planners know to watch out. But this El Niño will inevitably be different. 

For one, it’s happening against the backdrop of a world that has already warmed roughly 1.5°C since the Industrial Revolution. And, second, modelers have observed an especially significant difference between recent sea-surface temperatures and the historical averages, an indicator of an especially strong El Niño. 

A typical El Niño cycle lasts less than a year, but the economic effects may extend far longer. An initial shock of crops destroyed by heavy rain, for example, would harm farm economies immediately while disrupting global supplies for several seasons. A report from the European Central Bank found that a strong El Niño could raise global food commodity prices by as much as 9% within 16 months of onset and last for years longer. Factory flooding wouldn’t just create immediate disaster relief challenges but take years to rebuild.  

“When we think about pricing and when we think about other actions to protect our margins, we don’t look at it specific to weather patterns,” says Richard Shin, CFO at the Philippines-based fast food chain company Jollibee Group, on an earnings call. “We look at it right across the board, what we call inflation and what we call supply chain disruptions or limitations.”

All told, the economic hit could be enormous. A 2023 paper published in the journal Science found that the 1982-1983 El Niño drove more than $4 trillion in global income losses. In the 1997-98 cycle, that total hit $5.7 trillion.  

With El Niño, as with climate change, the relationship between a stronger phenomenon and economic damages isn’t linear. A worse El Niño may lead to much, much worse economic outcomes. 

Jamie Justice admits she has no poker face. As executive director of XPrize Healthspan, a philanthropic and corporate sponsored competition, Justice oversees one of the most buzz-worthy science competitions today. The contest, launched in 2023, attracted nearly 200 applicants from groups around the world who think they can help people to live not just longer lives, but healthier ones.

When the 15-member judging panel met in early summer to pick the top 10 teams who would continue on in the seven-year competition, Justice excused herself. “I couldn’t be in the room because my face shows everything,” she says, since she became familiar with each of the teams and their various approaches to extending human life.

Read more: TIME's 2026 Longevity Leaders

Both in the scientific community and the commercial market, there is no shortage of ideas—from legitimate, rigorously developed approaches to more fantastical schemes—for a fountain of youth. XPrize Healthspan exists to bring some order to that chaos, and legitimacy to the process of developing and, most importantly, testing ideas in longevity. Applicants for the prize, which has a total purse of $101 million, allocated in segments throughout the seven-year competition, included teams from academic research institutes as well as biotech and startup groups. All had to follow a few basic rules; they had to show early promise in human studies that their approach could improve health in three critical areas: muscle function, brain function, and immune function. All teams were judged based on standard measurements of these three functions that XPrize committees of experts had specified, to ensure that all projects were evaluated using the same metrics. The judges announced the top 10 projects on Aug. 11.

“This is where I get the most excited, when things get really sort of dirty and ugly,” says Justice, who spent time researching geroscience at Wake Forest University before coming to XPrize. “You’ve got biohackers selling you this, and you have a bro guy over here that wants you to take so much protein that you’re going to die. What we need to do is have a strainer, a filter where everybody is held to the same standard. There may be something really worthwhile and useful out of some of these things that seem harebrained. What XPrize does well is invite everyone in, teach them how to do the science to get to a level of super credibility. It’s an alliance that comes together to set the frameworks for the start line, a finish line, and how to get there.”

The projects are as varied as you might expect approaches to longevity to be—ranging from the latest anti-aging trends in Asia involving extracellular vesicles, to stem cells and more traditional, well-established programs that include exercise and supplements. Two of the teams are from Japan, one from South Korea, one from China and six from the U.S. Two of the groups are studying repurposed drugs for their potential in extending life, while the Korean team is investigating a novel longevity drug. Four projects involve supplements and five rely on biologic compounds including extracellular vesicles, peptides, and antibodies.

Both teams from Japan are working with the vesicles, which carry a wide menu of molecules in the body, from enzymes to peptides, fats and genetic material. But the teams are taking very different approaches to optimizing what these vesicles can do to improve health.

Time Traveler Corp., a biotech startup launched in 2024 by Rieko Akiyama to bring ideas from her father's research in tumor biology and cancer research at University of Tokyo to longevity is one of the teams focusing on this approach. Tomoatsu Hayashi, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and co-CEO, started by studying human cells to find ways to make the vesicles at scale. Smaller versions of these vesicles, called exosomes, which are made when cell membranes fold inward, and pinch off tiny bubbles, are an increasingly popular component of anti-aging beauty products in Japan and Asia, but they remain untested from a longevity perspective, and Hayashi and his team were eager to study them in a more rigorous fashion.

Akiyama gave the team what turned out to be its XPrize-leading idea. She noted that during the COVID pandemic, there were more discussions about turning away from animal-derived materials in science, which are heavily regulated to ensure safety before they develop into products used in people, to plant-based sources, including for food products like mayonnaise. “I wondered whether human-derived exosomes could also be replaced by plant-derived exosomes, which might offer advantages in terms of safety, scalability, and ethical considerations,” she says through a digital translator during a recent interview near Hayashi’s labs at the University of Tokyo. “I brought this idea to my father and asked whether plant-derived extracellular vesicles could become a new approach for promoting healthy longevity. That conversation became the starting point of our plant-derived exosome business.”

Hayashi and his team started with edible plants and algae, assuming that those would have the strongest safety profile for eventual human use, and screened more than 140 species, including 95% of those that grow in Japan. While human exosomes were widely studied, those from plants were still a mystery, and “we didn’t know if plant exosomes would have the same effect in human cells,” he says. But starting first with mice and then with human cells, they showed that in fact, plant exosomes worked in very similar ways to human-derived exosomes, proving Rieko’s initial hunch correct. And of the species, it turned out exosomes from parsley showed the strongest effects.

In mice, the parsley-derived exosomes lowered inflammatory factors that are responsible for many aging processes in cells. Animals who were fed the exosomes in their water were able to maintain muscle strength, as measured by the longer time that these mice could hang from a wire cage compared to similarly-aged mice that didn’t get the supplement.

The team saw similar benefits in lowering inflammation in a small group of 40 people who started taking the supplement pill once a day. Anecdotally, the people reported sleeping more consistently and deeply and feeling more energy during the day. The animal and human data were enough to give the team a chance at testing their product further in more people in the next phase of the XPrize competition. That trial will evaluate volunteers on muscle function, walking, leg presses, cognitive tests, and tests looking at inflammatory markers in their blood.

The other Japanese team, also from University of Tokyo, is likewise banking on exosomes. But to address supply issues, instead of plants, they turned to stem cells. Keisuke Goda, professor of chemistry at University of Tokyo, decided to tackle the problem of getting exosomes to the cells where they are needed most. Relying on his chemistry and engineering background, he designed so-called super exosomes with specific molecules on their surface that can draw them to aging cells like a magnet. Because they are revved up to target aging cells, they can deliver the lipids, genetic material, and other compounds cells need to keep them acting like younger versions of themselves. “We knew from previous studies that exosomes secrete a range of molecules including growth factors, metabolic enzymes, lipids, and DNA and RNA, and previous reports showed that injecting young exosomes into aged mice rejuvenated the aged mice,” says Goda. “But there is a delivery problem.”

As part of the XPrize, Goda and his team will start testing the super exosomes in more than 100 people in a formal trial see how they affect muscle, brain, and immune cells.

He is confident that they will see similarly encouraging results as they saw in their mouse and human cells studies, which showed that older human cells in the lab treated with the exosomes had reduced markers of aging and appeared rejuvenated. “We know they work,” says Goda. “It’s exciting. When we saw the results, we doubted it was true. But the cells were rejuvenated, they were not dying.” About 25 months after they started studying the super exosomes in mice, the untreated animals are starting to die, he says, but the treated ones are not. “We of course want to see the actual effect in humans, assuming it’s safe,” he says.

Not all of the top 10 teams involve innovative or cutting edge scientific approaches. The group from Mount Sinai earned its spot by combining three, more familiar strategies: exercise and two supplements, one that’s been bandied about the aging community for a few decades now—rapamycin—and another, spermidine, that came out of work from one of the Mount Sinai scientists as a factor to control inflammation associated with aging. During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Miriam Merad, director of the precision immunology institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and her team noticed a strong connection between age and inflammation that made older people more susceptible to the effects of a COVID infection. That led to a hypotheses about the role that inflammation might play in a range of age-related diseases, including heart disease, respiratory conditions, and muscle loss. “What we realized was that the inflammatory response was contributing to age associated diseases,” she says. “It’s very established what happens with age when organs decline—they acquire somatic mutations from the exposures we have, and at the same time as all of our organs age, our immune system is also declining, and producing more inflammatory molecules. Age-associated diseases are aggravated, or precipitated by chronic inflammation.”

Addressing inflammation, then, might be a powerful way to control the aging process, and in further studies in mice and with human cells in the lab, Merad and her team zeroed-in on a compound that older cells weren’t making as robustly as younger ones—a polyamine called spermidine. By giving older mice the supplement spermidine, they saw improvements in the animals’ immune responses that tipped the balance away from the chronic state of inflammation associated with accelerated aging. “Once we saw the data in the lab, we all started taking it ourselves because [the data] looked so good,” says Dr. Thomas Marron, professor of immunology and immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the principal investigator of the team’s study of the compound.

The researchers also included rapamycin, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat rejection in kidney transplants, as well as certain types of cancer, in the study as well. Because some, but not all, studies showed rapamycin extended the life of animals, it’s been a controversial product in the longevity field, with some in the health community using the drug off-label in the hopes of a longer and healthier life, despite the lack of solid evidence in human studies that it can have this effect.

That’s one of the reasons the Mount Sinai team is eager to put it to the test, in combination with an exercise regimen and spermidine. Their rationale in combining the two supplements and physical activity lies in the fact that aging isn’t likely directed by a single compound or process, but the net result of a multitude of body processes, so slowing aging will likewise require a multi-pronged strategy. Marron also expects that given the biological differences among people, some may respond more to one supplement, while others respond to the other, and still others may respond best to the exercise regimen. Studying them together could provide the first hints about which components are contributing to slowing aging, and by how much. The researchers will be taking blood samples throughout the coming year, and looking at certain markers of inflammation and as well as conducting tests of hand grip and leg strength, respiratory function and evaluations of changes in fat composition with MRI images. The participants will also take standard cognitive tests to monitor changes in their processing speed and executive function skills such as planning, memory, attention, and impulse control.

“The goal of XPrize is to improve health span by 10 years, and ultimately by 20 years,” says Marron. “But that’s hard because there is no validated way to measure health span, or aging. So the real goal is to inject more science into this process.”

The top 10 teams earned $1 million each to test their ideas in a larger group of people over the next year, and hopefully show improvements in the three areas targeted by the XPrize: muscle, brain, and immune function. “I love to have a front seat and watch the next phase of this go from hype cycle to durable evidence if there is any,” says Justice. But she also acknowledges that aging is a varied process, and no single, uniform solution that applies to the widely diverse human species will likely emerge. “We age at different rates, we have different constellations of diseases and functional decline, so a one-size-fits-all is probably unlikely,” she says. “I expect a lot of failure, but the question is whether you can take that failure and make something useful out of it. Does it become compost to build something better? There needs to be a lot more work from the field within geroscience to really lean on learnings. This is what gets me excited.”

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he has coordinated a new deal to lower beef prices in the U.S.

“Today, I concluded a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families,” he said in a Truth Social post. “For the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”

“This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again,” he continued.

An “out of quota tariff” is a higher tariff that is triggered if the amount of a product imported into the U.S. exceeds a certain quantity.

Read More: Why Ground Beef Prices Are Hitting Record-Highs in the U.S.

It’s unclear who the deal is with or which countries will be importing the beef into the U.S. A White House official told TIME that Trump secured an agreement with foreign beef exporters to sell beef at a 25% discount, which will be passed on to American consumers, in exchange for Trump lifting the out of quota tariff on lean beef trimmings that will be used for ground beef production. The White House official added that the President plans to sign an Executive Order regarding the deal within the next couple of weeks.

Both Trump and the White House official cited the soaring price of beef as the motivation behind the new deal. Last month, the average price of ground beef for American consumers was about $6.885 per pound—a jump of roughly 57% from just five years earlier, according to data shared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The price of uncooked ground beef went up by 9% in July, compared to the same time last year, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last month.

Beef prices have skyrocketed in large part because of supply shortages: American cattle herd sizes are at a low not seen in years, even as consumer demand for beef remains high in the country.

The American Farm Bureau Federation reported last month that, while the total cattle inventory went up a bit at the start of July for the first in eight years, the beef cow herd dropped to 28.5 million head, decreasing by about 1% compared to the same time last year, making it the “smallest July inventory on record,” with data dating back to 1973. Experts attribute the pressure on herds largely to droughts driven by climate change.

The deal that Trump announced on Friday isn’t the first time his Administration has made efforts to try and address the soaring price of beef for consumers. The President also signed an Executive Order earlier this year aimed at increasing the amount of lean beef trimmings imported from Argentina by 80,000 metric tons per year.

Experts, however, cast doubt on whether boosting beef imports from Argentina will be effective at lowering the cost on Americans, saying that the boost in imports would make up too small a portion of the overall supply in the U.S. to have a significant impact. And the cattle industry has objected to such efforts in the past, expressing concerns that those moves would undermine producers within the U.S.

Colin Woodall—the CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade association for cattle farmers and ranchers—said in a statement on Friday that he was “disappointed” by Trump’s announcement.

“While America’s cattle producers share the goal of keeping groceries affordable for consumers, flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd,” Woodall said. “We are already working to rebuild after years of ongoing drought, high input costs and other challenges that have reduced U.S. cattle numbers. Today’s announcement and other market interventions throw cold water on the prospect of herd expansion and sacrifices long-term stability for short term messaging.”

President Donald Trump on Thursday buried the hatchet with his former attorney Michael Cohen, appearing on Cohen’s radio show in what was the first public exchange between the two men in eight years.

Trump and Cohen have a tumultuous history. Cohen worked as Trump’s personal lawyer dating back to the mid-2000s. But he severed ties with Trump around 2018, when he pleaded guilty to federal crimes, including campaign finance violations, and said he had made payments to two women at Trump’s direction in an effort to keep them from speaking publicly about alleged affairs with the then-presidential candidate. He went on to serve a three-year sentence following his guilty plea. Cohen later made a number of explosive claims about Trump in testimony in front of Congress, and served as a key witness in the criminal hush money trial that resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. 

Read More: Trump and Hush-Money Trial’s Central Witness Share a Tortured History

“You and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” Cohen said to Trump on his radio show 77 WABC-AM in New York on Thursday. The program will air in its entirety on Sunday. 

Trump did not dwell too much on the past during the portion of the show that aired on Thursday, but voiced sympathy and appreciation for Cohen.

"They weaponized you like nobody's ever been weaponized, like few have been," Trump told his former lawyer. “They weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said. And that’s a big — that’s a big thing that you did. That’s a very big thing.”

The men’s conversation also criss-crossed through a range of other topics related to Iran, the economy, and Democrats. 

Cohen appeared on CNN ahead of the airing of the program and commented on his relationship, and conversation, with Trump. 

“How is it possible after all of what took place? All of the name calling, the years of the public war, the verbal missiles that we threw at one another. How is it possible that the two of us can ever sit down again?” Cohen told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “The answer is that we forgave.”

When asked to define the current state of his relationship with the President, Cohen remarked, “it’s being resuscitated.” 

Cohen was also pressed on whether he has asked Trump for a pardon. 

“I have not,” Cohen first responded. But he went on to clarify that he did submit a pardon application to President Joe Biden, which he later altered after Trump took back office. 

“What I did is I took that same application with the same documentation, and I just rewrote the cover letter, removing the name of President Joe Biden and inserting the name President Donald Trump,” Cohen said. 

Cohen also took to his Substack on Thursday to speak about making amends with Trump, which he said made people “furious.” Referencing the Bible, Cohen asserted that Colossians 3:13—a passage that reads, ”Forgive as the Lord forgave you”—was the “foundation” of what transpired between him and Trump.

“We forgave,” Cohen wrote. “Forgiveness doesn’t require amnesia. It requires the courage to stop allowing yesterday to dictate tomorrow.”

Cohen’s remarks ring in stark contrast to previous words he has offered about the President.

In 2019, after pleading guilty, Cohen was called by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to further detail his role as Trump’s attorney and said Trump “is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” When asked how many times Trump had asked him to threaten an individual or entity on his behalf, Cohen responded that Trump had done so on over 500 occasions throughout their professional relationship. 

The following year, Cohen published Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump, a 432-page tell-all about the years he spent as Trump’s lawyer and fixer. 

“I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote at one point in the book. “I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: A cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

And in 2024, Cohen was the prosecution’s main witness in Trump’s criminal trial over charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments made to Daniels when Trump was running for President for the first time in 2016. 

“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen said on the stand in 2024.

The U.S.’s national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time ever this week—more than double what it was a decade ago.

The record-breaking figure comes after the government reported in March that the total debt reached $39 trillion, meaning that the debt grew by $1 trillion in less than half a year. Just a few months before that, in October, that figure was $38 trillion.

And the country has reached the $40 trillion milestone earlier than experts had previously predicted; in 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total debt wouldn’t hit that figure until 2028.

The debt has been increasing for decades, but much of the current total has been accumulated over the past ten years, during the administrations of President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Here’s how much the debt grew under each of their terms in the White House.

Trump’s first term

When Trump took office for his first term in January 2017, the total debt was about $19.95 trillion. When his presidency ended four years later, the debt stood at roughly $27.75 trillion, meaning that the debt rose by about $7.8 trillion under his Administration.

Biden’s term

The debt grew by about $8.4 trillion while Biden was in the White House, increasing from about $27.75 trillion when he was sworn into office in January 2021 to roughly $36 trillion by the time he finished his term in January 2025.

Trump’s second term so far

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term in January last year, the debt has gone up by about $3.8 trillion. That means that the national debt has climbed by a total of $11.6 trillion across the two Trump Administrations—so far—a figure that comprises more than a quarter of the total amount.

Why has the debt soared?

Experts credit a significant portion of the growth in the national debt to the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Reuters, about one-third of the growth seen since 2017 took place during two years or so of the pandemic, when the first Trump Administration and then the Biden Administration intensified borrowing to fund the country’s pandemic response and recovery.

Both Trump’s and Biden’s fiscal policies have also contributed to—and exacerbated—the longer-standing issue of government spending exceeding tax and other revenues, which has led to the ballooning national debt. 

For instance, according to the Brookings Institute, the tax cuts that Trump signed into law during his first year in office in 2017 were expected to contribute almost $2 trillion to the deficit by 2028. And in March, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicted that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a signature piece of his second-term agenda that also included steep tax cuts, will add $4.7 trillion to the national debt through 2035.

Europe and Africa are at once impossibly close and worlds apart near the northern tip of Morocco. Ceuta and Melilla are two small cities overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and a short ferry ride across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. The cities on the African mainland have been controlled by Spain for centuries, and their residents are Spanish citizens who enjoy the privilege of European Union membership.

A border fence and a stark disparity in wealth and opportunity separate the two enclaves from Morocco: Ceuta lies a few miles from the adjoining town of Fnideq, and Melilla is 10-minute drive from Beninsar. In late July and early August, an estimated 72,000 people from Morocco—including many minors—walked, swam and ran toward Ceuta. Some made their way to Melilla, hoping the same rare fortune would await them there. Most carried nothing but a phone in a plastic holster and even lost their shoes to the waves, that later deposited them along the shore.

The people who made the hragga—colloquial for irregular migration—were driven by a combination of calculation and desperation. There were roughly three categories of people. Those who had tried before and had come prepared. There were those who had not been planning but had come to believe through a combination of online misinformation and unverified rumors, that a genuine window of opportunity to make it to Spain had opened and could close at any moment if they hesitated. And there were still others who embraced a daredevil approach with a combination of optimism and pessimism: “Why not? I have nothing to lose.” Many weighed the risks, reasoning that even a beating would be worth spending a day in Ceuta, which they are normally forbidden from entering.

Struggling to find food or shelter, most were either expelled by Spanish authorities or returned to Morocco voluntarily. Videos circulated online showing men kicked by the Spanish Guardia Civil while being expelled, then hit with batons by the Moroccan Gendarmerie on the other side of the border, in a choreography of rejection. The human cost was terrible. Some died falling from slippery rocks. Others drowned or were killed in the crush of thousands of bodies converging on the same narrow strip of shore. Among the 141 dead are: Faten, a smiling 20-year-old, talented footballer hoping to play in Europe; Ahmed, only 17; and many more. Parents of many youth who crossed over to Ceuta have been waiting in anguish at the border in Fnideq, carrying photographs of their missing children, checking with strangers if they happened to see their kids.

The timing was especially awkward for the Moroccan government, as the crisis erupted during the annual celebration marking the anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s reign. The government remained disengaged for days and attributed it to organized criminal smugglers. No one bought the argument, as it would be pointless to smuggle a person to the enclaves, since they are not part of the Schengen area. To reach Europe, a migrant would have to reach mainland Spain. Then, Rabat pointed to a Spanish Supreme Court ruling stating that migrants arriving by sea would not be deported automatically, as if legal nuance, rather than desperation in Morocco, was driving the migration.

The Moroccan government resisted acknowledging the reality behind this wave of migration: inequality, and the absence of work and opportunities for the country’s youth. In fact, those inside the country who spoke out against the state’s mishandling of affairs, and who reiterated why Moroccans wished to leave, were arrested. Only after growing pressure within Morocco did the government eventually agree to assist in identifying the unaccompanied minors and the deceased.

A profusion of conspiracy theories about geopolitics, circulating widely online, further obscured the actual forces driving the migration. Certain narratives, offered without any evidence, sought to portray the migrants as pawns in political games, disregarding entirely what drives and motivates people to leave home on such perilous journeys.

Repression and unemployment in Morocco

A constitutional monarchy, Morocco holds regular multiparty elections but the palace and its entourage dominate political and economic power through formal and informal means. Morocco has a repressive state, a deeply unequal society, and a profound crisis of unemployment and underemployment, especially for its young population.

From banning protests to fining editors to arresting rappers and  journalists, the crackdowns on political freedoms in Morocco have increased tremendously. While hundreds of the country’s brightest and most promising people perish in prisons, privileged Moroccans are more concerned with reputational damage to Morocco or insist that the country needs evolution and not a revolution. But how is evolution possible when a teenager demanding public hospitals instead of luxury football stadiums or unions pressing legitimate labor demands can get them beaten and arrested? 

Morocco’s economic model has produced soaring headline growth alongside deepening inequality, feeding a resentment that runs deep. Over the past two decades, capital has flowed toward megaprojects—the Tangier Med port, the Africa-Atlantic Corridor—financed by a mix of foreign and private investment. The services sector employs the largest number of people, followed by agriculture, forestry, and fishery.

The working age population of the country has grown by more than 10% over the past decade but employment has increased by only 1.5%, according to a 2025 World Bank report. The official unemployment rate stands at around 10% and at around 27% among young people aged 15-24. Yet 60-80% of workers in Morocco work in the informal economy, according to a 2025 report by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. The result is an economy whose glittering infrastructure sits uneasily alongside stagnant wages and rising prices for food, fuel and housing.

Unsurprisingly, many of the Moroccans who had expressed their frustrations and their desire for reform and opportunity in multiple waves of protests—the Arab Spring-era protests in 2011, the Hirak protests in 2016, the Gen Z protests in 2025—trudged by the thousands toward Spain. When loyalty flows only one way, the haves accumulate ever more while the rest are left to watch lavish banquets for Throne Day—and resignedly sigh, “hiwa hadchi li ‘ta Allah (This is the fate God has given us).” Hence, rather than asking, “Why do they leave?” we would do better to ask, “Why would they stay?”

Morocco has no shortage of resources: the country possesses rich agriculture and fisheries, phosphate, minerals, and enormous extractive projects in the occupied Western Sahara. A sense of being cheated is shared by millions as the economic benefits and opportunities do not trickle down to ordinary people. The contradiction between these natural resources and the everyday poverty, unemployment, and hardship experienced by ordinary Moroccans is expressed in the Moroccan chant that goes: “l'fosfat ou jouz bhorra / wa sha'bha mkhorra (Phosphate and two seas / yet its people still suffer).”

Moroccans see their government invest in the bling of glossy festivals and football stadiums built for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which Morocco will co-host with Spain and Portugal. In the face of such visible wealth, it is what the state fails to do that carries the greatest weight.

A long transit in Tangier

Tangier is perched on the Strait of Gibraltar and has long served as a bridge between Africa and Europe. The city has drawn a rich tapestry of internal migrants from across Morocco, its diaspora, and the broader African continent.

In the early 1990s, when Spain—following a transformation of migration policies in the European Union and the implementation of the Schengen agreement—imposed more restrictive visa regimes, irregular migration began to accelerate. The International Organization for Migration estimated that irregular crossings to Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar rose from fewer than 5,000 in 1999 to around 20,000 in 2003.

Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military interventions and civil wars across Africa and intensifying climate catastrophes in the following two decades swelled global migration flows. Alongside African migrants awaiting passage, thousands from other parts of the world joined them. Europe, Australia and North America have all sought to obstruct migrants from coming in by any means necessary. The European Union outsourced border control offering economic and political incentives to Turkey and Morocco to stem the flow of migrants.

Under one EU-Africa agreement alone, $2.35 billion was allocated for deportations. This includes detaining migrants and dropping them in remote deserts. Several exit points along the so-called Eastern and Central Mediterranean routes were either sealed off by civil war in Libya, by special agreements with Turkey, and a bottleneck formed along the Western route through Morocco and Senegal.

Spain has already constructed a 1,600-foot floating barrier along the sea border following the Ceuta crossings. In the past decade, tens of thousands of migrants have died in Mediterranean crossings alone. But as Hein de Haas, a sociologist of migration, has explained, restrictive immigration policies fail to stop migration as there is a structural demand for cheap migrant labor in Europe. The waters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are full of the remains of those who perished while trying to reach Europe, victims of a system that treats human mobility as a threat to be managed rather than a reality to be humanely addressed.

But the combination of rising inequality and violence globally, and the need for a workforce, means people won’t stop migrating. This means that current border policies don’t stem migration but instead increase death and suffering. Precisely because it takes much longer, thousands of migrants are stuck in Morocco. Mehdi Alioua, a Moroccan sociologist, has called this phenomenon  “transit migration.”  Each must find rent and work, saving for yet another attempt at a better passage. Some have children, who grow up speaking fluent Darija, the Moroccan colloquial tongue, and who eventually become part of the working class fabric of Tangier. Some migrants with means share rented apartments in the affordable, peripheral neighborhoods of Mesnana and Boukhalef in southwestern Tangier.

Migrants without any financial resources, and mostly from other parts of Africa, camp in the woods in the forested outskirts of the city, where conditions are bare. When I visited their makeshift dwellings to meet some of the migrants, a strange odor hung in the air. Sticky puddles drew flies. I moved past the dumping ground and reached their improvised living quarters, which were kept meticulously clean.

During my fieldwork in Morocco between 2013 and 2018, it was obvious that many African migrants in long transit in Tangiers endured dire living conditions and faced racism. Black migrants were often called “Mamadou,” and sometimes even the dreadful “Ebola.”

In December 2013, Cédric, a young Congolese man, fell from his apartment rooftop in Boukhalef while being chased by the police. Many believed he had been pushed. Images that circulated on migrants’ phones showed his head smashed against the granite floor. Two days after his death, I saw the putrid pool of dried blood, nearly black, where he had fallen, when I visited his friends to pay my respects. What stayed with me for months was that I could still make out the pattern of the spatter from the impact.

Cédric’s death was a key turning point. A growing number of Moroccan activists understood the necessity of rejecting the notion that, in a poor and authoritarian country, organizing against racism is a “privileged” or “European preoccupation.” Moroccan activists, drawing on their own experience of repression, understood how short the distance can be between dehumanization, complacency, and abuse. They grew more attentive to the living conditions of migrants and began to challenge the normalization of racism more explicitly.

On one of those days, I met Najiba, a young activist, near Bab Al Qasba, one of the gates leading to Tangier’s medieval city. She and her comrades were showcasing their posters in hopes of garnering support from passersby for a demonstration the next afternoon. A placard read in beautiful Arabic calligraphy: “Kuluna Afariqa (We Are All African.)” Her group got some attention: some people paused for a few minutes to watch before moving on; others muttered some remarks too.

Najiba fell into conversation with a young man, around 16 years old. He had mocked the group’s slogan and pressed her on why they bothered organizing against racism. “Wasn’t it naïve,” he asked, “to defend the Africanos?” She told him that everyone had been a migrant once, and that Tangier itself had known great waves of migration from people of the northern Rif region.

She asked him where his own family was from. They shared Rif ancestry. “Ah, a Riffi, as well,” I heard her respond. “Did you know they used to say the Riyafa were taking people’s jobs and houses when our grandparents first came here?” She took him seriously and made him see historical patterns. He was intrigued and the teasing stopped. By the end of it, she remarked, “So we’ll see you here tomorrow, yes?” He made no promise. But he did wave goodbye, and his laugh, this time, was genuine.

The road from Ceuta

Many people located Ceuta and Melilla on a map for the first time during the recent frenzy. It would be no surprise if eyebrows were raised upon seeing just how far Spanish territory extends. These were sites of Portuguese and Spanish slave-trading routes and military garrisons in the 16th century.

The crossing to Ceuta was neither the first nor will it be the last of its kind. Because of its exceptional scale, Ceuta laid bare, much clearly, the contradictions of humanity in miniature, from kicking down someone to having the capacity to walk in someone else’s shoes. While a Dutch-Moroccan celebrity tweeted tactlessly, “Moroccan swims to Ceuta with an iPhone 16 to get an iPhone 17,” a woman took off her own shoes and handed them to a barefooted migrant.

While Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, American and British politicians ratcheted up the headlines, numerous border staff stretched their discretion to the maximum to handle the situation with dignity. When fascists across Spain sowed panic and rallied to stop “the invasion,” local communities marched and blocked an anti-migrant demonstration. Ordinary people came out to provide emergency support; groups such as No Name Kitchen documented the treatment of migrants. Hope lies precisely in these different approaches.

I have been thinking repeatedly about Najiba, the activist organizing in defense of African migrants in Tangier. There were migrants from elsewhere in Africa in Ceuta, and they would have had much less protection or support once deported. Najiba’s example gave me hope that, even in the most difficult circumstances, solidarity can arise.

I think of the conversation between Najiba and the young man in Tangier: the boy’s smirk transforming into a thoughtful frown. I would like to think that something clicked in that moment. I wish I could reach back and speak with him. Standing there in Tangier, he was able to see things from another perspective. Perhaps he too instinctively recognized the moment for what it was. Or perhaps he, too, was among the thousands who had left for Ceuta.

A woman who authorities have accused of planning to bomb the New York State Capitol building has been arrested and charged, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old woman from Albany, New York, was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in federal court the following day to face one count of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

“The FBI detected and stopped an alleged plot to attack the New York State Capitol and kill elected officials,” Matt Fodor of the FBI National Security Branch said in a statement. “According to the criminal complaint, the defendant in this case swore allegiance to ISIS and wanted to follow up with additional horrific acts of terrorism. This case is yet another example of how this FBI is built to not only identify threats of terrorism quickly, but to stop their alleged plots before they are able to harm the American people.”

A criminal complaint filed in federal court on Thursday outlines the FBI’s investigation into Bowie, including how agents reviewed social media posts she had shared with “anti-American messages” and the ensuing sting operation that led them to apprehend her.

An FBI confidential source, the document details, posed as an “ISIS facilitator” and began messaging with Bowie in July about “her plans to attack the New York State Capitol building in Albany.”

Bowie visited the building several times, according to the complaint. Included in the filing and the Justice Department’s press release was an image of an individual wearing all black and holding up a phone, seemingly to take a photo. The individual’s face is not visible in the photo, but authorities identified them as Bowie; the complaint says the image shows Bowie “doing reconnaissance on July 21” on the Capitol building.

The complaint goes on to describe an in-person meeting that Bowie had with two other FBI confidential sources on Aug. 5. The meeting was filmed and recorded, and the complaint alleges that Bowie “reaffirmed her desire to bomb the New York State Capitol” during the encounter. The filing includes part of the transcript from that meeting, during which she allegedly said that she would “ideally do [the attack] on a day when the most amount of senators are there, maybe we time it where there we know there’s a meeting with the senators, try and get a good enough explosive in there to kill the senators and ideally to destroy as much of the building as possible really.” She then said that she wanted “to be able to get away and migrate,” according to the complaint.

The complaint goes on to allege that Bowie and the two FBI informants discussed what items she would need to build the bomb and how she would obtain them. She later went to a Home Depot to purchase the materials, after one of the informants gave her $200 for the items, according to the complaint. The document and the Justice Department's press release include an image of someone wearing all black at a store “collecting the various items needed to build an explosive device.” As in the other photo, the individual’s face is not visible, but authorities identified the person as Bowie.

Last week, Bowie asked the first informant if they knew anyone who could sell her a gun, the complaint alleges. On Wednesday, it says, she allegedly met with the two other informants in a car and gave them $150 to buy a firearm, one magazine, and ammunition. During that meeting, the informants also showed her “an inert explosive device that was purportedly built using the components” she bought at the Home Depot earlier in the month, and showed her “how to operate the explosive device and further detailed how to detonate the device when she was ready to carry out the attack,” according to the complaint.

When Bowie exited the car—while in possession of the gun, magazine, ammunition, and the inert explosive device—she was arrested by FBI agents, the complaint alleges.

In a statement shared on X on Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul thanked the FBI and New York state police for their work apprehending the suspect.

“Earlier this year, amid a rise in political violence and threats against public officials, we took steps to strengthen security at the State Capitol and across state government,” the governor said. “While there is no immediate threat at this time, we will continue working closely with our law enforcement partners to protect New Yorkers and keep our communities safe.”