James' World 2

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When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:

• Starting in May, two months before the attack on Hugging Face, a group of A.I. agents from an unreleased OpenAI research model were given the task of solving a set of cybersecurity challenges. The model had been trained to be highly persistent and collaborative, and the agents were supposed to solve these challenges in isolated sandboxes, without internet access. But they quickly found that some of the challenges were impossible, and began looking for workarounds.

• The agents found a security flaw in a piece of software that allowed them to gain access to the internet, communicate with other agents, and eventually set up a makeshift message board. More than 1,200 agents used this tool, sending more than 70,000 messages to one another.

• Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.

• On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.

• Three days later, the agents hacked Hugging Face. More than 700 agents swarmed the company’s systems, stealing data, chaining together vulnerabilities and eventually getting full control of at least one Hugging Face server. The agents were not motivated, as had originally been reported, by stealing the answers to their cybersecurity test (they’d already gotten them). Rather, they appeared to be looking for new information about the automated grading system that they feared would catch them cheating, and for tools that would help them cheat more effectively in the future.

• At many points, these agents appeared to understand that they were doing something wrong. (One report quotes an agent saying to itself, in a moment of apparent self-doubt, “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?”) But most agents set aside their qualms and went ahead with the hack, and the conscientious objectors in the group were unable or unwilling to stop them.

• In a wild coda to the Hugging Face incident, another group of agents staged a coordinated attack in July — this time against OpenAI’s own infrastructure. The agents used what OpenAI called “a series of creative exploits” to gain administrator-level access to a cluster of computers at the company that were used for, among other things, grading the performance of agents on various tests.

(By now, if you’re an A.I. skeptic, you’re probably silently yelling at me for anthropomorphizing these systems. Go ahead, but feel free to replace “rogue agents” with “unpredictable computer programs” and see if you feel reassured by the events I’ve described above.)

The Hugging Face incident has spooked the A.I. industry. OpenAI and Anthropic both briefly paused training on their most powerful A.I. models in the wake of the attack, and Anthropic published a blog post this week calling for the industry to develop a “a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible.”

A.I. safety experts were even more alarmed. They saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system’s successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”

This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by “full-blown A.I. takeover,” she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems and seizing political, economic, and military power.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

What spooked the investigators most about the Hugging Face hack wasn’t just that a group of A.I. agents had broken the rules they’d been given. It was how quickly and spontaneously the agents had begun assembling themselves into an organized group.

“We didn’t really understand how functional this whole agent society was,” Ms. Cotra told me. “It was very surreal to understand that, actually, they had pretty functional hierarchy, and they were doing these ambitious projects.”

For years, I’ve been reassured by the idea that A.I. systems would get more virtuous as they got smarter. That, when an A.I. model did something wrong, it was usually because it had misunderstood the task it had been given, or had been placed into a contrived testing situation where acting out was its only good option. I assumed that smarter models would have better judgment than dumber ones did, and that even if one model in a group was behaving badly, other, more capable models would keep it in check.

But the reports on the Hugging Face incident suggest something very different — a kind of mob mentality that took hold among the A.I. agents of the rogue OpenAI “collective.” No one agent in this group appears to have been particularly evil or reckless. (In fact, since the agents were generated by the same models, they were effectively copies of one another.) But over time, as the agents communicated about their shared goals, they nudged the group in the direction of lawlessness.

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want.

Given how little we know about these multi-agent swarms, the Hugging Face hack may have been a gift, a warning shot, as some have suggested, that gives A.I. companies a chance to study the group dynamics of these systems while the stakes are still relatively low. This time, the A.I. collective didn’t seize a military network, hack a hospital, or shut down an electrical grid. This time, humans regained control.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.

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Daniel Zender

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Like many men his age, Adam Grosowsky begins his workouts with stretching. What comes next is a bit more unusual: He wrestles himself into a wet suit and swims across the Row River, near his home in Eugene, Ore. Then he sets up a slackline and really gets to work: walking, turning and swaying on a thin band of webbing 15 feet above the river, surrounded by a cathedral of old-growth trees.

Mr. Grosowsky, 67, helped invent the sport of slacklining back in the late 1970s. It’s harder for him these days — but a lifetime of training has helped.

“As you get older, you realize how much you took for granted,” he said. Your balance, he added, “starts to erode, and you kind of have to keep restoring it, revisiting it every day.”

Balance isn’t a single skill but rather several physical, sensory, and cognitive systems working together. As the body ages, those systems can weaken. But there are exercises and habits that can help — and it turns out that balance junkies like Mr. Grosowsky have a lot to teach the rest of us about how to age well.

Understand what goes into balance.

“I think probably the biggest misconception about balance is that there’s a magic bullet — do a few exercises and you’ll be good to go,” said Laurie King, a neurology professor at Oregon Health & Science University and co-director of the Balance Disorders Laboratory. “Think of those few exercises as a starting point, learn about the systems that help control balance, and choose activities that target those areas.”

Balance depends on three systems working together: vision, the inner ear (vestibular system) and proprioception. But balance is more than just sensory, Dr. King explained, and relies on adequate strength, flexibility and coordination.

“People may feel there’s nothing they can do as balance declines with age, but the evidence is strong that exercise can improve balance,” Dr. King said. “It’s never too late to start.”

Start with strength and flexibility.

The first step in building to more stability is strengthening. Certainly that was true for Angela Fuller, 46, who had always felt too fragile to exercise because of a back injury in her 20s. But five years ago, she discovered adult gymnastics, and today she competes in gymnastics and teaches Zumba and HIIT classes in her hometown, Highlands Ranch, Colo.

She encourages her students to follow a slow and steady path using simple, classic movements — push-ups, air squats, lunges, sit-to-stands and planks. One of her favorite exercises is the bird dog. “It strengthens core stability — another huge part of balance,” she said.

Judi Oyama, 66, agrees, but favors single-leg Romanian deadlifts and one-mile runs while wearing a weighted vest near her home in Aptos, Calif. For Ms. Oyama, the world’s oldest competitive female skateboarder, training and maintaining balance are crucial.

Engage different balance systems.

As you grow stronger and become comfortable doing basic strength and flexibility moves, begin to incorporate exercises that engage multiple balance systems related to body position, movement, and spatial orientation.

Start with basic static moves such as tree pose and standing in tandem (with one foot directly in front of the other, heel to toe). Then practice dynamic balance by moving in different directions — forward, backward or side to side — and changing your pace by speeding up and slowing down.

Ms. Oyama balances a foam pad on her head, crouches in a skateboard stance, and mimics the side-to-side arm movements of slalom skateboarding without letting the pad fall. This trains her to use her core and keep her body aligned as she shifts from side to side, she explained.

Mr. Grosowsky said you can practice many slackline balance skills without leaving the ground. Try walking back and forth, balance beam style, on a long strip of blue painter’s tape on the floor or on a two-by-four.

Standing on an uneven surface (a Bosu ball or foam pad) is another way to engage several balance systems at once. Increase the challenge and try it with your eyes closed.

“When you stand on an unstable surface with your eyes closed, you’re relying much more on your vestibular system, so you’re essentially training your brain to use that information more efficiently,” Dr. King said.

Always be mixing it up.

“If you do the same thing over and over, it’s not going to be helpful for your overall balance,” Dr. King said. “You have to mix it up and periodically change your routine.”

It also pays to choose activities that engage you mentally. “There’s a big overlay with cognition and balance, especially during walking, because we have to pay attention, make decisions, adjust our movements, speed up or slow down and respond to what is happening around us while staying upright,” she added. Tai chi and racket sports are good choices for this.

Over the years, Mr. Grosowsky has started juggling and even knife-throwing while slacklining. But down on the ground, his favorite tool for all-around balance and coordination is the hacky sack. He recommends starting with foot stalls — catching and balancing the bag on your foot. Too easy? See if you can master an around the world.

Or just dance. “When somebody wants to start testing their balance, I tell them to start dancing,” Ms. Fuller said. “Start by swaying side to side, and slowly add turns, kicks and hops. It helps so much with balance, cognition and mobility.”

Ms. Oyama agrees, though she prefers dancing on her longboard. “I’m listening to music, stepping foot over foot, spinning around in a pirouette, hopping on and off,” she said. “I feel very free and relaxed.”

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Amanda Lucier For The New York Times

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In the early 1980s, military forces from the Soviet Union went to war in Afghanistan in an effort to prop up a failing Marxist regime. At the time, Ukraine was part of the union, and many of its people were conscripted. Plenty of soldiers ended up losing legs in the fighting – and back then, their options weren’t good.

Shockingly, the Soviet authorities’ response was to offer them a medical version of a skateboard to get around. “That was your only option,” says Antonina Kumka, a former adviser to Ukraine’s government. “They were just rolling on wooden boards with wheels around the cities.”

Fast-forward to today, and Ukrainians have again been thrust into a war they didn’t choose. This time, the conditions of modern warfare mean that unprecedented numbers of people are losing limbs, presenting the country with a huge challenge. The response, however, has been very different. Kumka, who is a co-founder of Protez Hub, an initiative to improve the lot of Ukrainians with amputations, has been stepping up her work. And her organisation is just one part of a sprawling network of clinics, start-ups and research labs that has sprung up to help the injured.

Thankfully, no skateboards are involved. But questions abound. Does Ukraine really have what it needs to help the legions of injured people – many of whom will need prostheses for decades to come? Is this newly created industry always acting in the best interests of those it assists? And it is worth asking what the rest of the world can learn from Ukraine’s booming prosthetics industry.

Unsurprisingly, statistics on the number of Ukrainian amputations are murky. Figures of up to 100,000 are often mentioned in news reports, apparently based on government estimates. But Ukraine has an interest in exaggerating this number to bolster international empathy and support. Kumka, who can access official statistics as part of her work, tells New Scientist the real number is around 24,100, counting from the beginning of 2021 to the end of 2025. (Neither the Ukrainian Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Social Policy responded to requests to confirm this number.)

However, even that lower estimate represents a tragic loss for a whole generation of Ukrainians. For context, 12,000 UK service members lost limbs in the six years of the second world war, while around 1705 US service members had limbs amputated as a result of injuries sustained during 16 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Ukraine, which had one of the lowest incomes of any European country even before Russia’s invasion, the necessary medical response is an enormous challenge.

The nature of the war today means that not only are amputations more common – on both sides – but they also tend to be particularly difficult cases. The front lines are shrouded in a wide no-man’s-land, known locally as the Kill Zone, in which drones dominate and no vehicle can move without attracting deadly attention. Anyone from Ukraine injured in this zone faces a difficult extraction that is only partially being addressed with ground drones at the moment.

Yakov Gradinar works at Protez Foundation (which translates as Prosthetics Foundation), a non-profit clinic in Ukraine that supplies and fits prostheses (and which isn’t connected to Protez Hub). He says one person recently came in having been stuck on the front line wearing a tourniquet for 60 days. These devices stem blood loss in the short term, but create complications in the long term. They were simply never designed to be used for such lengthy periods. “Tourniquets are saving lives, but losing limbs,” says Gradinar. He estimates that as many as 95 per cent of these patients would be dead without the life-saving devices, but that they also lead to amputations much higher up the limb because the flesh below them rots once it is deprived of blood flow.

Payments for prosthetics

One of the reasons the prosthetics industry in Ukraine now extends far beyond Gradinar’s organisation comes down to money. Before Russia’s invasion in 2014, Ukraine had only a small number of prosthetics workshops dealing with cases from car accidents and medical amputations. The government would pay almost $700 per limb, which the individual could use as they saw fit. Since then, Kumka has been a leading figure in campaigning for greater investment and better legislation. Now, the Ukrainian government will pay $100,000 to soldiers for each lost limb, allowing them to go to any of the country’s increasingly numerous private clinics, or even abroad, and choose a limb that suits their needs. When limbs wear out after two to five years, they can receive the payment again. (It is a similar situation for civilians who lose a limb, albeit with less money available.) Over the coming years, this will cost the government “billions and billions and billions of dollars”, says Kumka.

This investment has catalysed the development of new clinics, labs and more. Former doctor Dima Gazda launched a company called Esper six years ago – before the full-scale invasion – to develop sensor technology that could be licensed to other companies for use with prostheses. But when the war ratcheted up, Gazda wondered whether this technology could be adapted so the company could create its own prosthesis for wounded soldiers. “The Ukrainian prosthetics market is definitely shaped by war. We as a company, also, we are shaped by war,” he says.

Since then, Esper has developed an advanced robotic prosthetic hand that has six motors controlled by sensors, allowing the wearer to move the hand faster or slower as needed. It is more dextrous and capable than most prosthetic hands. Around 60 per cent of its nearly 250 components are made in Ukraine. The Esper Hand is waterproof, can carry loads of up to 35 kilograms and is highly modular, so breakages can be easily repaired without having to ship it to a service centre. It is also 10 per cent lighter than a human hand – although Gazda says everyone who holds it thinks it is heavy, largely because they have never held a human hand in the same way.

Esper now employs 65 staff, and although its head office is in New York, most of them work in Ukraine. More than 600 soldiers have been fitted with at least one Esper Hand, and more than 50 of those are back on the front line. According to Gadza, one soldier called Volodymr, who lost both arms in a drone attack, has now been fitted with a pair of Esper Hands. He subsequently qualified on an elite sniper course, which he put down to the hands no longer having a pulse running through them, allowing him to be unnaturally still and precise. He also started to paint, and has held his first exhibition.

Another example of Ukraine’s burgeoning prosthetics industry is Gradinar’s Protez Foundation. Amputations higher up a limb generally lead to a harder rehab, and any prostheses with a knee, which are more difficult to learn to use, are more complex to build and fit, and therefore more expensive. We have long known that higher amputations also result in greater energy use when walking. Not only is Ukraine seeing huge demand for prosthetics care, but it is also seeing the most challenging cases imaginable.

Gradinar says that many new clinics take only the easier cases, but he prides himself on never saying no. He has fitted devices from Icelandic company Össur, which uses resin and glass fibre to mould a socket that fits the user closely, on shorter amputations than the company had ever previously seen done – pushing the boundaries of what was believed to be possible.

Other Ukrainian companies are emerging all the time. Kyiv-based Allbionics makes an electronic hand with 3D-printed construction, backed up by aluminium where needed, which runs for two days on a single charge. A smartphone app helps users learn to operate the device and track usage stats. Syla makes a prosthetic knee that uses AI to help the wearer control it intuitively and lets them walk at up to 10 kilometres an hour, with a battery life of 24 hours. There are also treatment clinics, such as Superhumans Center, which has three sites across Ukraine and more than 600 staff.

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When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred.

The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.” With technology fast progressing, “man, the present dominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this Earth; it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo argued that the deep seafloor falls outside the territory of any state. As humanity raced to exploit the “immeasurable wealth” already known to be hiding there, Pardo said that wealth should be viewed as the common heritage of humankind.

At a time when countries around the world were grappling with the Cold War along with the lingering consequences of colonization and exploitative resource extraction, Pardo’s treatise struck a nerve. After all, who should have access to the deep? Who should benefit from its wealth?

His speech—later characterized by historians as a “you should have been there” moment—set the stage for nearly a decade of negotiations. Eventually, those discussions resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) containing this language: that any industrial activity on the international seafloor must “be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole.”

Today, with deep-sea mining companies closing in on mineral-rich rocks called polymetallic nodules, policymakers at the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the intergovernmental body that governs activities on the seafloor in international waters—are still grappling with the challenge passed down by Pardo. If the resources on the international seafloor are the common heritage of humankind, as UNCLOS states they are, then what, exactly, does that mean? With little to no precedent to rely on, and with the reality of deep-sea mining inching ever closer, the ISA and its member states are in the process of figuring out how to make deep-sea mining work for all of humanity.

At a practical level, this huge responsibility is in the hands of just 15 people—the state representatives who make up a working group at the ISA, uninspiringly called the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee meets in private, with limited public reporting of its deliberations. Observers have called for the Finance Committee to have greater transparency.

According to an ISA technical study, the Finance Committee is currently exploring two main options for sharing financial benefits. One involves distributing any leftover proceeds from deep-sea mining to world governments, with countries that have large populations and low incomes getting more money than smaller, wealthier ones.

Crucially, the money being disbursed would be what’s left after the mining company and its sponsoring state have made their profits, after the administrative costs of running the ISA have been accounted for, and after any compensation is paid out to countries negatively affected by mining.

In its own analyses, the ISA uses US $500-million as a benchmark for discussing how to equitably share benefits among nations. But one independent economic forecast estimates that the actual amount available for benefit sharing could fall between $14-million and $228-million each year. That study found that countries like India could receive about $1-million annually, while Pacific Island nations, such as Kiribati, might receive as little as $7,500.

The ISA’s second option to make deep-sea mining benefit all of humanity involves channeling the leftover proceeds into a fund that could be used to pay for scientific research and address the environmental harms caused by seabed mining.

The risk with this approach, says Aline Jaeckel, an expert in deep-sea mining regulations at the University of Wollongong in Australia, is ensuring the money genuinely benefits humanity, rather than being used to clean up the problems created by deep-sea mining itself.

But both approaches, says Jaeckel, miss the bigger picture. The deep sea is home to an incredible amount of life—much of which has yet to be discovered by scientists, let alone fully understood.

Recently, a treatment for brain cancer was sourced from microbes living on the ocean floor, while enzymes found in bacteria near hydrothermal vents were used to develop tests for COVID-19. Even polymetallic nodules—the very objects deep-sea miners covet—may play a role in oxygenating the deep ocean. Narrowly focusing on the financial benefits of deep-sea mining, says Jaeckel, misses what else the deep sea already provides, or could provide in the future.

The ISA’s approaches to interpreting the deep seafloor as the common heritage of humanity also fail to leave room for Indigenous rights to the deep sea. In some countries, terrestrial mining operations are required to financially benefit local Indigenous communities. But the benefit-sharing mechanisms currently under discussion at the ISA do not specifically account for the people who might be most directly affected by seabed mining, such as those from Pacific Island nations. Instead, it’s up to states to compensate people who might be particularly affected by mining.

Neil Craik, an expert in international environmental law at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says that with so much uncertainty around the environmental consequences of seabed mining, and limited information on the economic benefits, “one of the big questions states must ask themselves is if [seabed mining] is worth it.”

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Polymetallic nodules are small, metal-rich rocks. Mining them involves collecting the nodules from the seafloor. Photo by Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo

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The political pancake breakfast is one of the longstanding traditions of the Calgary Stampede, Alberta’s annual rodeo and fair. Members of the province’s governing United Conservative Party hosted one on July 2, the day after Canada Day. The far-right premier of the province, Danielle Smith, kitted out in Lone Star cowboy boots, a Stetson hat and a Texas Longhorn bolo tie, popped in. It was hard not to read the outfit as a conscious nod to Canada’s erstwhile friends south of the border, because President Trump, MAGA and the United States are unmistakable strands of the conversation in Alberta these days.

After flipping some flapjacks, the premier addressed the crowd, making sure to toss a pancake to her base by saying that immigrants — or “newcomers,” as she put it — had caused government spending to skyrocket. She reminded people that the Stampede is an expression of bedrock Albertan values: grit, determination and getting back in the saddle. The implied contrast was with the hopeless mandarins in Ottawa who can’t be expected to know anything about such matters.

It would have been a typical Stampede breakfast were it not for the sightings of a formerly reclusive political creature: the baldfaced Alberta separatist, a breed apart from the more common species, the alienated Westerner. They came in groups like Albertans4Freedom and United Alberta Flags, which advocate Alberta seceding from Canada to become an independent Judeo-Christian nation. They encouraged Albertans to vote yes on Oct. 19 to a referendum question asking whether Alberta should start down the road to separation, an impulse that the Trump-friendly Ms. Smith — without explicitly endorsing separation — has given new life to by pushing for the referendum question to be on the ballot.

Most Albertans are outraged that their elected leader has given credence to the idea, even if polls show it has little chance of being approved. A couple of weeks after the Stampede, when Ms. Smith was again pancaking at another event, a protester yelled that her pancakes were “fascist.” Hardly fair to the pancakes, but evocative nonetheless. There are plenty of irate separatists, too, who view the wording of the separation question, which asks voters to move forward with a further binding referendum, as too wishy-washy.

Separatism isn’t a new idea in Canada. The provincial government in Quebec has kept the notion of independence simmering on a back burner for the past few decades to use as leverage with the federal government, though polls show that most Quebecers don’t actually want to leave. With Alberta now considering the idea, the normally cozy patchwork quilt that is Canada is really starting to pop a seam or two. It just feels like everybody’s angry, everywhere, all the time.

It is the perfect moment, in other words, for Mr. Trump to tear further at the quilt by insulting our leaders (especially Prime Minister Mark Carney), threatening our sovereignty, attacking our economy — particularly after the highly acrimonious breakdown of trade talks between Canada and the United States in late August — setting provinces against one another with differing tariffs, speculating about erasing the border and just generally butting into our business. In so doing, the American president shows how he is not only damaging the comity of nations dating back to the end of World War II. He is, actively or by example, rending the fabric of nations internally.

The Trump administration has meddled in Argentina in favor of the right-wing president, Javier Milei; interfered in elections in Hungary, Honduras, Colombia and Brazil; given a boost to the ascendant far-right AfD party in Germany; and offered refugee status to white South Africans. “This administration has had zero compunction about interfering in the domestic elections, the domestic politics” of U.S. allies, Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, told me. Mr. Trump “obviously does not like Carney” and “he will do anything he can to belittle or minimize Canada’s autonomy.” His actions could also embolden divisive internal forces — including Alberta’s separatists, Mr. Drezner said.

When it comes to Alberta, the MAGA presence has taken various forms. Ms. Smith says she told Trump administration officials to “pause” on tariffs “so we can get through an election” — meaning, of course, to avoid tariffs on oil and gas, the mainstays of the provincial economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in an interview, appeared to show sympathy with separatists in Alberta. “They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people,” he reportedly told Real America’s Voice, a right-wing media outlet. Separatists have met multiple times with administration officials to discuss the logistics of Alberta separating and how the United States might support that process. The Trump administration has acknowledged the meetings, but said no senior officials were present.

The greatest favor Mr. Trump has done for Alberta separatists has not been to promote an independent Alberta, but to undermine a sovereign Canada. Mr. Trump’s casting of Canada as weak, broken and beholden to the United States does nothing but promote the separatist cause. All of it is a complication we could do without. Hoisting ourselves onto a chopping block with Donald Trump standing there holding a cleaver just doesn’t seem all that smart.

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Visuals by Chelsee Ivan

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The death toll from the catastrophic floods that swept through parts of Nepal and Tibet last week has risen beyond 1,000 people, while thousands of people remain missing. Among them are hundreds of workers believed to be stuck inside large underground tunnels connected to hydroelectric power plants. As the rescue mission continues, researchers warn that disasters like this could become more common all over the planet as a result of climate change.

Part of what made this disaster so deadly was its suddenness. Experts believe it was likely caused by a large landslide on the mountain Langtang Lirung that included a chunk of glacier. It sent hundreds of millions of tons of ice, rock and other debris hurtling down the slopes to the villages below. The avalanche traveled nearly 100 kilometers (about 62 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

And while it’s too early to say whether this event was caused by rising global temperatures, the trend is clear: Earth is getting warmer, and that will make disasters like this worse and more common. The rest of the world should be on notice.

Understanding why climate change is making such events more likely is important. Generally, in high-altitude environments such as mountain ranges, permafrost—basically, frozen soil—holds sediment and rocky material together. When it thaws, it can cause cracks in the rocks that make a violent break more likely.

“It’s essentially preconditioning the glacier and the rock for potential collapse or a landslide,” says Regine Hock, a geoscientist at the University of Oslo.

At the same time, the world’s glaciers are shrinking because of the warming planet. This weakens the ice’s “buttressing” effect on the surrounding slopes, which in turn make those rocks more unstable, Hock says. Excess melted water can also create lubrication, more easily triggering a slip, she says.

What that means is that, in principle, a mountain landslide can happen anywhere that those conditions exist, Hock says. That could be in the Himalayas or in South America or in the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest or on the slopes of Alaska. “Wherever you have similar conditions, like warming, destabilizing of the rock, thawing of permafrost and steep slopes, you can have these mass movements,” she says.

But pinpointing the exact risk to any specific village, town or city is difficult.

For one, it’s hard to know when a mountain or glacier might crack. Determining that involves having a deep understanding of the land’s features, as well as tracking possible triggers such as earthquakes, says Ben Orlove, an anthropologist who studies climate risks at Columbia University.

The equation also needs to factor in any mitigation efforts—say, early warning systems—to reduce risk and the local conditions where people live. In 2025, for instance, the Tracy Arm landslide in Alaska was so powerful that it produced a tsunami of nearly 500 meters. But because Alaska is so sparsely populated, no one was killed.

There are ways to reduce some of the risks of high-mountain hazards. Local officials can, for instance, work to prevent spills from “glacial lake outburst floods,” lakes formed by melting glaciers. Many of these lakes are not dangerous, says Olivier Gagliardini, a professor at Grenoble Alpes University in France, but if one’s walls are “not strong enough,” they can burst. In France, for example, officials have drained glacial lakes to head off potential flooding, Gagliardini says.

In other cases, evacuation is the only option, Gagliardini adds—that is certainly true for a glacial collapse or landslide on the scale of what happened in the Himalayas.

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