James' World 2

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The latest evidence that Mars was once a warmer, wetter world comes from a surprising place—the hidden subsurface depths of Jezero Crater—rather than its surface, which NASA’s Perseverance rover has explored for the past five years. The site of a vast, dried-up lake, Jezero also hosts ancient river deltas. Laid down by flowing water as early as 3.7 billion years ago, these deltas are so sprawling that they can be seen from orbit. Now, however, Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar has found signs of an even older river-and-delta system at Jezero that is buried deep beneath the surface.

Published today in the journal Science Advances, the findings suggest the Red Planet’s window of habitability stretches even further back in time than many scientists had imagined.

“It extends the window of fluvial deposition on Mars,” says Emily Cardarelli, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the study’s lead author. “On Earth, those conditions produce minerals that can preserve fossils.

Jezero is the crash site of an asteroid that slammed into Mars’s surface almost four billion years ago. NASA chose it as Perseverance’s exploration zone because it has a wealth of fluvial features that hint that the crater was once ripe for life—and for preserving life’s telltale traces in stone. The new study relies on data from 78 traverses of the area from September 2023 to February 2024.

The rover used its radar capabilities to study layers of sediment buried more than 35 meters below ground—nearly twice as deep as it had previously probed—where it registered echoes of even older river-carved slopes and sinuous, meandering channels. These subsurface features, the researchers say, formed as early as 4.2 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years before the water-washed terrain that Perseverance has been studying on the surface. That means there were multiple sustained periods of water flow in the crater’s history—multiple opportunities scattered across Jezero’s deep past in which it might have harbored life.

The result also reinforces that Mars is now a planet that is almost frozen in time, with lands that are far more undisturbed than any on Earth. “The fact that we have this record of this age is remarkable,” Cardarelli says. On Earth, rocks of a similar age lost any clear signature of ancient rivers long ago. “They’ve been heated, they’ve been squished, and they’ve been altered by water,” she says. “They’ve had a rough time.

With this more intact geological record, astrobiologists hope Mars can yield not only the first-ever smoking-gun proof of extraterrestrial life but also clearer data on how that life emerged in the first place. This question, it turns out, could be of equal importance for understanding life’s origins on Earth as well: circumstantial evidence suggests that ancient asteroid impacts much like the one that carved out Jezero Crater could have also exported any early Martian life to our own world.

The newfound buried river delta “is very clear evidence for a long duration of activity,” says Jack Mustard, a planetary scientist at Brown University, who has extensively studied Jezero Crater. “And that’s very exciting to have,” Mustard says the distinct delta beneath the soil isn’t surprising because sporadic periods of flow are common in the formation of rivers and lakes. “If you were to ask someone how the Mississippi Delta formed,” he says, “you would see multiple episodes of overlapping deltas.”

Cardarelli says that we haven’t heard the last about Jezero from Perseverance. “There’s a lot more to say about this particular area—and other areas within the crater,” she says. “We’re still digesting all our data.”

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As the Iran war stretches into its third week, Democrats say they’re done with all of the classified briefings from top administration officials.

They now want public hearings into whether President Donald Trump plans to put U.S. boots on the ground in Iran, secure nuclear material there, and how he plans to end the deadly conflict in the Middle East.

Few Republicans agree such hearings are needed. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., went even further, suggesting that public hearings would compromise the operation in Iran.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. who has led unsuccessful efforts to pass war powers resolutions to rein in Trump’s military operations, said that Trump “hasn’t given a rationale that’s convincing for this. … We have now said we’re tired of the classified briefings. We’re tired of hiding this from the public.”

“When you keep something in secret, there’s a reason you keep it in secret because you don’t believe it will stand analysis in the light of day,” he said.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, agreed. “If this administration thinks it can defend this war — I don’t know how it can — then it should send Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio to the Senate next week for a hearing in front of the relevant committees,” Murphy said of Trump’s secretaries of Defense and State.

If Republicans ignore their demands, Murphy and Kaine said, Democrats will force more votes on Trump’s war powers, putting more political pressure on the GOP.

“I think they’ll lose votes in the Senate if they actually have to go in front of the American public and explain why gas prices are so high, explain whether we’re engaged in regime change or whether we’re not, explain how they’re going to get the nuclear weapons and the nuclear material without the ground invasion,” Murphy said. “I don’t think they have answers for any of that.”

There’s confusion on and off Capitol Hill about Trump’s strategy with Iran. Who exactly will seize Iran’s nuclear materials? Does the president want regime change? And how does he intend to end Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which is causing oil prices to climb?

Just this week, NATO allies and other nations rejected Trump’s pleas to help pressure Iran to end its blockade of the key waterway. The president then wrote: “WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”

One key Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had been privately and publicly urging Trump to strike Iran this year, said he believes Republicans should hold public hearings at the “appropriate” time.

“I think we need to. I think we need to showcase what we did and why we did it, but we’re in the middle of doing it,” said Graham, who is running for re-election this year. “But it’s very important for me to tell people back home, Americans over there have to be over there to prevent the Ayatollah from getting a nuclear weapon.”

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., a member of Armed Services, said he has no objection to doing public hearings, “but I still want my classifieds.”

And retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., conceded that hearings will happen “at some point” because “we have to learn from our successes; we have to learn from any mistakes.”

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House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said public hearings “would adversely affect our mission.”Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

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President Trump and top federal health officials have repeatedly claimed that their new website, TrumpRx, offers Americans the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs.

“I took prescription drugs, a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest,” Mr. Trump said during his State of the Union address last month.

That is not true, according to a review by The New York Times and the German news organizations Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR.

The drugs listed on TrumpRx can cost American patients up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, while a patient walking into a German pharmacy pays next to nothing. The German health system foots the bill, and records show that, more often than not, it pays less than what the Trump administration negotiated for Americans.

The TrumpRx website shows the prices that the administration negotiated for a few dozen of the several thousand prescription medications in the United States. The list includes almost none of the most widely used drugs, like statins, or ultra-expensive drugs like cancer therapies.

Some well-known drugs on the list are Xeljanz, for autoimmune conditions, and Farxiga, for diabetes and heart and kidney problems. Both are cheaper in Germany, a rare example of a country that makes its negotiated drug prices public.

The biggest names on TrumpRx are two blockbuster weight-loss drugs — Wegovy and Zepbound. Both are available for lower out-of-pocket prices at pharmacies in wealthy countries around the world. In some cases, Americans pay about twice as much as patients overseas.

Higher price for Wegovy on TrumpRx

How much patients pay out of pocket at a pharmacy, without using insurance, for a four-week supply of a medium dose (one milligram) of Wegovy, Novo Nordisk’s injection for weight loss.

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President Trump unveiled the TrumpRx website last month. Visitors to the site are greeted by a promise: “Find the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs.” Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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For people with near-total paralysis, the ability to communicate easily in real time is a challenge. For years, scientists have been working to remedy that by developing devices that can decode brain signals and translate them into computer cursor movements or text.

These devices are a type of brain-computer interface, or BCI, and they consist of electrode chips that are implanted inside the brain to listen to and decode the electrical whispers of neurons. In the past, BCIs allowed people to type using a virtual keyboard, but the speed was frustratingly slow. Now, however, a team of scientists report that their BCI keyboard helped two people with paralysis type at speeds of up to 22 words per minute—nearly as fast as the average person can text using a smartphone. The findings were published today in Nature Neuroscience.

“This is an important technical advance that brings brain-computer typing much closer to practical communication speeds for people with paralysis,” says Edward Chang, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

“At about 22 words per minute, this is among the fastest motor-cortex typing BCIs yet and dramatically faster than most earlier neural spellers,” says Chang, who has worked on another speech-decoding BCI.

BCI technology has advanced significantly since its genesis in the 1960s, when researchers began using single electrodes implanted in the brains of monkeys to record their neural activity. In 2006, a consortium of researchers called BrainGate reported that a BCI allowed people with paralysis to control a computer cursor and operate a prosthetic hand. In recent years, the BrainGate BCI was used to control a virtual keyboard with a cursor and to decode letters from handwriting areas of the brain. Other groups’ BCIs have decoded words or short phrases directly from speech-related brain regions, too.

Previous versions of these brain-typing systems required participants to control a cursor on a screen and individually select letters, “which is far slower than being able to access any key at any time using your fingers,” says lead study author Justin Jude, a postdoctoral researcher at BrainGate, based at Brown University, and an appointed research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

In the new paper, Jude and his colleagues trained their BCI using artificial intelligence to recognize intended hand or finger movements from a part of the brain’s movement area, called the precentral gyrus, as participants tried to move their paralyzed hands or fingers. The AI model predicted the letters on a QWERTY keyboard that the movements most likely corresponded to. They tested their system in two participants: one person with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurological disease that causes paralysis, and one with a spinal cord injury that left them paralyzed but still able to speak.

Using the device, the latter participant was able to type at 110 characters or 22 words per minute, with a word error rate of 1.6 percent. The other participant’s typing was slower but still impressive for someone who lacked the ability to speak. By comparison, several years ago, the BrainGate handwriting BCI achieved speeds of 90 characters per minute (about 18 words per minute). Another previous BCI that was implanted in a speech-related brain region by Chang and his colleagues was used to achieve a typing speed of 78 words per minute, but the median word error rate was far higher—25 percent.

“One of the things that we talk about a lot is the speed of communication. The reason we do that is not just to have a faster system than someone else,” says Daniel Rubin, a critical care neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who was a co-author of the new study.

People who have lost the ability to speak and to use their hands might be able to employ an eye-tracking system to type, but this method is slow. “Communication speed matters, because being part of a conversation matters,” Rubin says.

The researchers say the QWERTY keyboard system is more successful than the version that decoded mental handwriting. It remains to be seen, however, whether decoding from brain regions that control finger movement or from speech-related regions is a better strategy overall, Chang says. Signals in the brain’s motor cortex are easier to decode, but those in speech-related areas might be faster and more direct.

The technology is not ready for widespread use yet; the study was small, and the device requires brain surgery, which carries risks. “The biggest limitations are the small number of participants and the need for invasive intracortical implants,” Chang says.

Another limitation is the need to calibrate the BCI each time before it can used. “It’s almost like a musical instrument, and you have to tune it each day,” Rubin says. Having an instrument that can tune itself is a big goal for the field, he says.

Several companies are developing commercial BCIs, primarily for use in people who are paralyzed. Perhaps the most hyped has been Elon Musk’s Neuralink, but there are others, such as Paradromics and Synchron. (Some of the study authors consult for these companies and receive research funding from them.)

China recently approved the first invasive BCI for use in people with a form of partial paralysis. No such devices have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use by people with paralysis in the U.S.

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In a letter posted to X, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent said that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and claimed the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

The White House dismissed the letter, saying the president had “compelling evidence” that Iran was going to attack the US first. A US hate monitor accused Kent of “antisemitic tropes”.

With his departure, Kent is the most high-profile figure within the Trump administration to publicly criticise the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said Kent was a “nice guy”, but “weak on security”.

He also said Kent’s resignation letter had made him realise “it was a good thing that he’s out”.

Latest updates: Trump lashes out at Nato allies

In the letter addressed to Trump, Kent alleged that “high-ranking Israeli officials” and influential US journalists had sowed “misinformation” that led the president to undermine his “America First” platform.

“This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” the letter continued. “This was a lie.”

Kent, a long-time supporter of Trump who unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice, was nominated by the president early in his administration and narrowly confirmed to his post. Democrats had criticised Kent’s hiring of a member of the far-right Proud Boys as a consultant to his 2022 election bid.

In his confirmation hearings, Kent also refused to back away from claims that federal agents had fomented the January 2021 riot at the US Capitol, or that Trump had not been defeated in the 2020 election.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a US antisemitism monitor, said in a statement that Kent’s accusations “traffic in old-age antisemitic tropes”.

“So it’s no surprise that he would blame Israel and the media for pushing the President into war against the Iranian regime,” the ADL said.

The pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), reposted the ADL statement on X. Aipac did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment.

Ilan Goldenberg, a senior official at the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group J Street, described Kent’s letter as “ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes”.

Kent, 45, is a US special forces and CIA veteran whose wife, navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019.

The father-of-two deployed 11 times overseas with the US military, including with the US Army’s special forces in Iraq.

He later became a paramilitary officer at the CIA, before leaving government service following his wife’s death.

Kent cited his military service and his wife’s death in his letter, saying that he “cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives”.

At the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent reported to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and oversaw the analysis and detection of potential terrorist threats from around the globe.

Following Kent’s resignation on Tuesday, Gabbard backed Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.

In a statement posted on X, she said that as commander-in-chief, the president was responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat.

She noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was responsible for helping to provide the president “with the best information available to inform his decisions”.

“After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion,” Gabbard wrote on X.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Kent’s suggestion that “Trump made the decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable”.

“As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first,” she added.

In a brief interview with the New York Times, conservative media commentator Tucker Carlson praised Kent, with whom he has close personal ties.

“Joe is the bravest man I know, and he can’t be dismissed as a nut,” Carlson said. “He’s leaving a job that gave him access to the highest-level relevant intelligence. The neocons will try to destroy him for that.”

“He understands that and did it anyway,” he added.

There have been a number of resignations among senior officials in the Trump administration, including Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement director Margaret Ryan and Kennedy Center head Ric Grenell.

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Joe Kent is a long-time Trump supporter and decorated veteran of the US military.

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Hmmmm … an attempt to keep a highly questionable administration in office!

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What We’re Covering Today

• Voter ID Bill: Under pressure from President Trump, the House and the far right, Senate Republicans opened debate on Tuesday on legislation they call the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show approved photo identification to vote in federal elections and proof of citizenship to register. It is expected to be a prolonged and bitter election-year debate, with the potential to disenfranchise millions of voters.

• D.H.S. Funding: The White House indicated in a letter to two Senate Republicans that it was open to rolling back some of its aggressive immigration enforcement efforts. Trump officials have been negotiating on the enforcement campaign with Democrats to end a partial government shutdown, which has disrupted most funding for the Department of Homeland Security and, according to a top T.S.A. official, could force smaller U.S. airports to close.

• Epstein Files: The House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi, requiring her to testify in a deposition about the Justice Department’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and its release of material connected to Epstein. The deposition has been scheduled for April 14. Five Republicans had joined Democrats in voting to approve the subpoena two weeks ago. Separately, Ms. Bondi and Todd Blanche, her deputy, will brief committee members on Wednesday.

The Senate voted 51-48 to open debate on its contentious voter ID bill, with Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrats in opposition. The debate is expected to last for days, and the close vote illustrates the tensions surrounding the legislation.

Senator Thom Tillis, another Republican opponent of the legislation, was absent.

The Senate is teeing up its first test vote on the Republican proposal to put tougher voter identification and registration rules in place for the November elections. At least one Republican, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, has said he would join Democrats in opposing the effort to bring the bill to the floor, narrowing the Republican margin for error. If the first procedural hurdle is cleared, days of debate are expected.

What’s in the voter ID bill that Trump and Republicans are pushing?

The Senate has taken up a strict voter identification bill that President Trump has demanded Congress deliver him, and that he and his Republican allies groundlessly claim is needed to combat mass voter fraud by noncitizens.

Passed narrowly by the House last month, the legislation, which Republicans call the SAVE America Act, would normally seem to have little chance of enactment given near-solid Democratic opposition. That means it lacks the 60 votes required to move to a final vote.

President Trump threatened on Tuesday to campaign against any lawmaker who votes against the voter ID bill, escalating what had been a steady barrage of warnings against any effort to stymie the politically divisive legislation. “Only sick, demented, or deranged people in the House or Senate could vote against THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” he wrote in a social media post, in which he pledged he would never endorse anyone who voted against it.

The Senate’s debate over the bill is expected to be long and bitter.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday narrowly agreed to open what is expected to be a prolonged and bitter election-year debate on a bill to stiffen voter identification and registration rules, defying Democratic vows to block the measure even though they lack the votes in their own ranks to push it through.

Under pressure from President Trump, the House and the far right, Senate Republicans voted to move ahead with the legislation they call the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show approved photo identification to vote in federal elections and proof of citizenship to register. It would also require states to turn over voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to remove those flagged as noncitizens. 

David Steiner, the postmaster general, said at a congressional oversight hearing that at the current rate, “we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months, so in about a year from now the postal service will be unable to deliver the mail if we continue the status quo.”

“The postal service is at a critical juncture,” he said.

Trump administration offers narrow immigration changes to end D.H.S. shutdown.

White House officials on Tuesday outlined narrow adjustments the administration would make to federal immigration enforcement operations to answer Democratic demands for major changes in exchange for funding the Department of Homeland Security.

In a letter to Senate Republicans, the administration ignored several of Democrats’ top priorities, including blocking immigration officers from wearing masks to shield their identities and requiring them to obtain warrants from judges to enter private homes or businesses. And the proposal did not address Democrats’ call for a use-of-force policy, a central demand they made after federal immigration officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis.

A T.S.A. official warns that small U.S. airports could close if the partial government shutdown continues.

With more than 30 percent of Transportation Security Administration officers absent from work at several airports across the United States this week, a senior T.S.A. official warned on Tuesday that the ongoing partial government shutdown may force the closure of small U.S. airports.

The latest court ruling voiding the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America dealt another blow to Kari Lake, a Trump ally and the de-facto head of V.O.A.’s oversight agency, and President Trump, who has called the news group the “voice of radical America.” It was not immediately clear whether the administration will appeal.

This ruling comes more than a week after Judge Lamberth ruled Lake’s appointment illegal, effectively voiding all layoffs. But that ruling fell short of ordering the administration to bring back journalists and resume all news programming. Nearly all V.O.A. journalists had been on paid leave since March, 2025.

A federal judge has voided nearly all actions that the Trump administration took to shutter Voice of America, a federally funded news group that broadcast to countries with limited press freedoms, such as Iran, China and Russia.

In a victory for V.O.A. reporters and staff who sued the administration, Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered more than 1,000 full-time journalists and support staff at the news group to return to work by March 23 and to resume broadcasting operations.

Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington, who is presiding over the lawsuit challenging President Trump’s White House ballroom project, said he would rule on a motion to halt construction by the end of March.

A bipartisan bill would waive Trump’s $100,000 visa fees for medical professionals.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the House on Tuesday would waive the $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas for foreign health care professionals seeking to work in the United States, among them doctors and nurses.

The fee, imposed by the Trump administration last September, threatened to drive up costs for hospitals that rely on foreign health providers for staffing, and typically bring on a new class of medical residents, among them many foreign medical school graduates, on July 1.

As Congress remains locked in a standoff over funding the Department of Homeland Security, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said that progress had not yet been made around some of Democrats’ major demands. Those demands include requiring officers to not use masks, to display visible identification, and to require warrants when entering private homes. “They haven’t budged on those,” Schumer said of the White House. “They’ve got to get serious.” The department’s funding lapsed on Feb. 14, but negotiations have remained stalled.

Chief Justice John Roberts says personal attacks on judges are ‘dangerous’ and must stop.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday denounced personal attacks aimed at judges and justices, calling them “dangerous.”

“It’s got to stop,” he said.

Democrats hammer Trump on ‘energy affordability.’

Democrats are dialing up their rhetorical attacks against President Trump over energy affordability as the war against Iran drags into its third week, and oil prices remain elevated.

In a new report on Tuesday, top Senate Democrats accused the Trump administration of waging a “war on energy affordability” by canceling hundreds of clean energy projects even before the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran — strikes which have sent energy costs higher. The report is a precursor to a series of live-streamed round-table discussions that party leaders hope will keep a spotlight on their campaign mantra for the fall’s midterm elections, focusing on lowering the cost of living.

The House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, requiring her to testify in a deposition about the Justice Department’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and its release of material connected to Epstein. Representative James R. Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee, was forced to issue the subpoena after a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted to do so in a hearing.

In the subpoena, Comer scheduled Bondi’s deposition for April 14. Separately, Bondi and Todd Blanche, her deputy, will brief committee members on Wednesday.

Speaking in the Oval Office, President Trump said Cuba’s government was in “very bad shape” and that “they are talking to Marco,’’ referring to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio stepped in to say that “their economy does not work, it is a non-functioning economy” and that the country’s subsidies from Venezuela had halted. The Trump administration is seeking to push the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, from power, according to four people familiar with talks between U.S. and Cuban officials.

President Trump just addressed his trip to China, which he delayed over the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. “We are resetting the meeting, and it looks like it will happen in five or six weeks,’’ Trump said, speaking in the Oval Office.

Trump says Newsom shouldn’t be president because he is dyslexic.

President Trump said on Monday that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat widely seen as a likely presidential contender, should not be president because he has dyslexia. A leading advocacy group for people with learning disabilities criticized the comments.

In an appearance at the White House, Mr. Trump said that he was “all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president — a president should not have learning disabilities.” He added, referring to Mr. Newsom, “Everything about him is dumb.”

Judge ejects federal prosecutor from court and orders bosses to testify.

A federal judge threw a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom during a sentencing hearing this week and demanded that the office’s leadership testify about who had authority over their actions, according to court documents.

The rapid sequence of events on Monday in the courtroom of Judge Zahid N. Quraishi was the latest indication of growing tensions between the Justice Department and the federal judiciary in New Jersey. It came during the scheduled sentencing of a man who last year agreed to plead guilty to possession of child pornography.

Trump officials weigh a new $1 billion deal to block offshore wind farms off New York and North Carolina.

The Trump administration is considering a new strategy for throttling the country’s offshore wind industry, after federal judges blocked its five previous attempts to stop wind farms under construction off the East Coast.

Senior administration officials are drafting settlement agreements that would pay nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, including copies of the agreements.

The Supreme Court has deferred a decision on Trump’s bid to end protections for migrants.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to immediately allow the Trump administration to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants living in the United States, and instead agreed to hear oral arguments in the matter in late April.

As part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, the administration has moved to terminate a program, known as Temporary Protected Status, that has allowed migrants from certain troubled nations to live and work legally in the United States. At issue in the cases before the Supreme Court are protections for some 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Legal Retribution Campaign: In the wake of a lacerating ruling by a federal judge derailing an inquiry into the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, prosecutors are floundering in the most basic steps of criminal investigations into those President Trump wants scrutinized.

• Susie Wiles Diagnosed With Breast Cancer: Trump’s White House chief of staff, the first woman to ever hold that position, said that the disease was caught in its early stages, and she is not planning to take a leave.

• War in the Middle East: The president is no stranger to staking out contradictory stands, part of what his aides say is his negotiating style. But on Iran, Trump’s shifting positions are colliding with the consequences of war. And a surge in oil price is threatening to raise costs across the economy and cut into the already modest stimulus the tax cuts passed by Republicans last year were poised to deliver.

• Kennedy Center: The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has voted to shutter the institution for a two-year renovation project after Trump warned them that the building was in “very bad shape” and had been on “the verge of collapse” before he took over.

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The Senate majority leader, John Thune, and his Republican colleagues plan to move ahead on Tuesday with the legislation they call the SAVE America Act. Credit…Nathan Howard for The New York Times

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