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The United States rushed over the weekend to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from an air base in southern England after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation, two U.S. officials said on Sunday.

The withdrawal was highly unusual: Such moves are rarely made so quickly from an allied air base in a peacetime country thousands of miles from a combat zone.

The need to move the bombers out of the base, R.A.F. Fairford, was deemed so urgent that some of the planes and their flight crews left while aerial refueling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights to the United States. At least three of the planes had landed at their home base in South Dakota by Sunday, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

The Pentagon’s European Command confirmed on Sunday that the bombers had left England but declined to comment on any new warnings.

“We can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to R.A.F. Fairford are redeploying to their home stations in the United States,” the command said in a statement. “U.S. Air Force bombers routinely operate around the world to support global force readiness and operational requirements.”

The British Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the movements of U.S. military assets.

American officials on Sunday declined to specify the nature of the new information that prompted the rapid withdrawal of the Air Force bombers, some of which had just arrived in the past week as part of a normal rotation of forces. One U.S. official said the new information was part of the same threat warnings that surfaced three weeks ago, but specific details and a sense of urgency spiked in the past 24 hours, alarming commanders.

The sudden pullout of the bombers came a week after the British police arrested five men who had been traveling last Sunday morning in white vans near the base, which has been used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The men were released on bail a day later after the authorities did not discover explosives in the vans.

But the police have repeatedly said the men remain under investigation, and a dual British-Iranian national was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week that the British government believed Iran played a part in planning those events. U.S. and British officials, as well as those in Germany and Israel, believe the operation is connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or a separate military headquarters in Tehran. Iran has denied the accusations.

The episode has presented the authorities with myriad puzzles as they try to sort out the events over the past week, including the arrests, the frantic evacuation of 85 homes, a bomb disposal robot searching the vans for explosives and a national security meeting convened by Mr. Burnham.

In July, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued a statement warning that allowing the United States to use the base “makes London responsible” for U.S. actions. “Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory,” the statement said, “is a legitimate target for our forces.”

In September, U.S. military commanders received a chilling warning from American and other Western intelligence agencies, according to U.S. officials briefed on the information. R.A.F. Fairford was the target of a potential Iran-backed attack.

The murky outlines of a plot had been pieced together through a combination of intercepted communications, informants and other intelligence. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his intelligence officials also warned their British counterparts of a probable Iranian-sponsored attack, though they did not provide a specific target. Follow-up attacks were likely to include drones, the confidential assessments warned.

After that initial warning last month, concern among officials across Europe surged. According to a senior U.S. official, Israel warned Germany that American bases there were at heightened risk, noting Spangdahlem and Ramstein in particular.

An Iran-backed plot to commit an attack in Britain would be a major escalation by Tehran against a Western country in apparent retaliation for the American-and Israeli-led war against Iran.

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A B-1 bomber at R.A.F. Fairford in Britain taking off on Sunday. All 12 B-1s were moved from the base in a highly unusual withdrawal. Credit…David Bown/Getty Images

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Although it not always obvious, sound guides how we experience the world around us. And the latest archaeoacoustic techniques show that even the world’s earliest architects understood this.

The ancient pre-Roman society of Etruria in central Italy, for example, embedded sound throughout its culture, using ritual calendars dedicated to recognising key noises of nature, such as thunder. They were also early pioneers of musical instruments in the southern Mediterranean region.

Surviving Etruscan painted tombs in towns such as Tarquinia, Chiusi and Orvieto are known for their dynamic scenes of music, feasting and the afterlife. But our latest research shows how these tombs – built for Etruscans of higher socioeconomic and political status—were designed to offer sophisticated sensory experiences.

This study springs from our existing research involving artificial intelligence (AI) and acoustics. This includes the University of Oxford-led Sounds of Silence project, which has used new acoustic techniques to investigate the soundscapes surrounding these Etruscan tombs. At Duke University, meanwhile, the Neuroartifact project is using neuroscience and AI to better understand the cognitive impact of archaeological artifacts.

We have combined all these techniques to shed fresh light on two 5th-century BC Etruscan painted tombs: Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri (Tomb of the Blue Demons) and Tomba del Gallo (Tomb of the Rooster).

Our research suggests these tombs were designed and constructed not simply to house the dead, but to affect the living through a sensorily immersive environment similar to a modern 3D film experience.

Archaeologists have tended to look at the paintings in these burial chambers as two-dimensional images to analyze. Our goal was to capture the “performing power”of these ancient monuments, using a combination of acoustic, visual and AI technology.

Upon walking into the Blue Demon tomb for the first time, I (Jacqueline) was immediately struck how the paintings seemed to confront me wherever I turned. Merry banqueters on the rear wall appeared unaware of the demons crawling up the side wall, as though ready to burst into the chamber itself.

My experience was, though, shaped by modern LED lighting. Ancient viewers would have relied on beeswax and tallow candles, incense burners and torches. The dim lighting would have both constrained their movement through the tomb and heightened their experience of what they were seeing.

How senses were heavily manipulated

Our research presents the first investigation of subterranean funerary spaces in Etruria as “transitional spaces” between life and death.

The senses of anyone entering these tombs were heavily manipulated. Intense sound effects—such as the exceptionally long reverberation and echoes inside the Blue Demon tomb—gave a dramatic soundtrack to this intense, immersive experience.

Torchlight or candles flickering across painted figures would have created movement amid the shadows. Incense and the smell of libations (ceremonial liquids) added yet another sensory dimension.

Our reconstructions support the idea that some Etruscan painted tombs were used and reused to perpetuate the legacy and power of their families or clans. They may have been kept open throughout the year for rituals commemorating important dates and festivals, as well as the worshipping of the dead.

The sophisticated design of these tombs is striking. While the Blue Demon induces perceptual disorientation, the Rooster privileges visual attention and the architectural discipline of gaze.

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Sailko via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND

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Investors hear a common refrain year after year: “It’s better to buy and hold and ride out the downturns. Missing only the 30 best days of market returns can meaningfully lower your portfolio value.”Using the S&P 500 Total Return Index since its base date of January 4, 1988, a buy-and-hold investor earned an 11.46% annualized return through July 31, 2026, turning $1 into $65.48.

Missing only the market’s 30 best days over that same span cuts the annualized return to 6.32%, leaving that $1 at just $10.60. That’s a loss of roughly 84% of the wealth a buy-and-hold investor would have built.

That fact is frequently highlighted to support the case for staying invested through downturns. It is also only half the picture.

Run the same exercise on the market’s 30 worst days instead, and a $1 investment that avoided them would have delivered a 17.41% annualized return and grown to $487.56. That’s more than seven times what buy-and-hold produced.

Challenging the conventional narrative

What should an investor make of this information?

It is remarkable that just 30 out of 9,716 market days can create such an extreme impact on wealth creation. While no one can predict the future, thoughtful portfolio construction and the inclusion of risk management strategies can allow an investor to avoid the futility of prediction altogether.

The best and worst days do not scatter randomly across the market’s history. Since 1988, a best or worst day has occurred within 21 trading days of another best or worst day more than 70% of the time.

The single most common gap between them was one day, meaning an extreme day was often followed immediately by another one.

Notably, nearly all of these days showed up during bear markets: On average, the S&P 500 had already fallen 29.17% from its prior peak by the time one of these best or worst days occurred.

Unless investors have tremendous luck or impossible foresight, conventional wisdom suggests that we simply have to take the bad days with the good.

However, the path dependency of returns and the asymmetric nature of drawdowns vs recoveries mean that passively holding through these periods can be far more consequential than the conventional narrative implies.

Consider that a -10% drawdown requires an +11.11% rally to get back to even, a -25% drawdown requires a +33.33% rally, a -40% drawdown requires a +66.67% rally, and a -50% drawdown requires a +100% rally just to break even.

For an investor with a real deadline — retirement in five years, a child’s tuition bill, a home purchase — the amount of time it takes to recover from these drawdowns presents material consequences for their lives.

A downturn that hits at the wrong moment can force a retiree to withdraw a larger share of a smaller portfolio to cover the same living expenses, extending the damage well beyond the market’s own recovery.

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The lightest punishment called for writing a paper and completing training. The most severe was expulsion from the school.

After a woman attending Cornell University accused seven fraternity members of sexually assaulting her in 2024, the university convened a closed proceeding to determine what had occurred and whether those men should face discipline.

Since then, the sanctions imposed on each of the men, and the reasoning behind those decisions, have remained secret. The school has said little.

But detailed summaries of the punishments obtained by The New York Times provide the first look at how Cornell administrators apportioned blame for the alcohol and drug-fueled gathering that the woman has said left her shattered and degraded.

Two of the fraternity members were expelled. Another, who had already graduated, was barred from campus. Two more were suspended. The remaining men were handed lighter punishments, the summaries show.

All of them have denied any wrongdoing, and the Tompkins County district attorney declined to prosecute in 2024. None of the men have been charged with a crime. Their fraternity, Chi Phi, has been banned from campus.

Still, since allegations from the woman who has become known as Jane Doe surfaced in a lawsuit on Sept. 16, they have touched off intense anger over sexual abuse on campus and why more is not done to punish those responsible. Others have criticized what they see as a rush to judge the seven men involved.

In her lawsuit, Jane Doe claimed that, from the start of her encounter involving the seven fraternity members, she was incapable of consent because she was severely intoxicated. The lawsuit inflamed particular ire by stating that the defendants were all “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to Cornell,” an assertion Cornell has said did not accurately reflect what occurred.

Combined with more than 1,000 pages of interview transcripts, police reports and other records gathered by Cornell investigators and previously obtained by The Times, the discipline summaries show that the university based its decisions on a broad and complicated body of evidence.In the end, the punishments handed out by the three-member panel, which met on Zoom over 12 days in May 2025, varied widely. The panel, which enforces federal civil rights at the university under Title IX provisions, did not conclude that Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by all the men she had accused, according to the discipline summaries.

The university investigative files outline in excruciating detail what the fraternity members were accused of doing on the night of Oct. 19, 2024.

It was Matthew Ingalls whom Jane Doe originally went to visit at the Chi Phi fraternity house at about 11 p.m. She walked there alone from a bar to see him, with her intoxication level from drinking through the evening at about a 5 out of 10, she told investigators.

After she arrived, Mr. Ingalls asked her if she wanted to have a threesome with Jonathan Newell, Jane Doe said. During that encounter, she said, the men gave her ketamine and alcohol. Eventually, other men engaged in sex acts with her without her consent and while she was incapacitated, she said.

At the end of the night at the fraternity house, when Jane Doe was near hallucinating, there was more sex, she told investigators.

Expulsions were handed to Mr. Ingalls and Mr. Newell — the man who sent a Snapchat message to other fraternity members encouraging them to enter the bedroom where Jane Doe was undressed, the discipline summaries show.

The discipline summaries show that the panel found Mr. Ingalls responsible for sexual assault, judging that he was willing to manipulate, exploit and endanger Jane Doe for his own self-interest and the entertainment of others.

A lawyer for Mr. Ingalls declined to comment.

Mr. Newell was also accused of sexual assault, the university files show. Jane Doe told police on Nov. 14, 2024, that he had struck her buttocks with enough force during intercourse to leave bruises, and that he had manipulated her to ingest ketamine.

It was not clear whether Mr. Newell had hired a lawyer, and he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Suspensions and disciplinary probation were given to Winston Lee and Gillio Lopes. Jane Doe had accused Mr. Lee of inhaling ketamine off her body and forcing oral sex on her. She alleged that Mr. Lopes had sex with her without her consent.

Mr. Lee was suspended for two years, with several semesters of disciplinary probation upon his return; Mr. Lopes received a three-semester suspension and two years of probation, the discipline summaries show. Both men also were ordered not to contact Jane Doe, and were required to study sexual harassment and to write reflection papers.

Lawyers for Mr. Lee and Mr. Lopes did not respond to requests for comment.

A persona non grata order was issued to Diego Sarabia, who had graduated by the time of the discipline panel’s ruling. Mr. Sarabia, whom Jane Doe accused of forcibly kissing her, was barred from campus for three years.

The remaining two men, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar, were ordered not to contact Jane Doe, to study sexual harassment, social media use and bystander intervention, and to write “reflection papers.” They were accused of being part of a group of men who entered the room after reading Mr. Newell’s Snapchat message.

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Of the seven fraternity members accused of assaulting Jane Doe at a Cornell University fraternity house, two were expelled, two were suspended and the other three received lesser punishments. Credit…Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

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