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Credit: Food & Wine / Amazon

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House Republicans on Thursday abruptly canceled a vote on a resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after it became clear they lacked the votes to defeat the measure.

The retreat was a striking setback that exposed fractures within the G.O.P. over the conflict at a moment when the party has begun pushing back forcefully on Mr. Trump and his agenda.

It also marked the latest embarrassing blow to Speaker Mike Johnson, who has toiled to defeat efforts to challenge or limit the war in line with the president’s wishes, but is contending with growing wariness within his party as the midterm elections approach and the realities of his minuscule majority.

The decision to shelve the war powers resolution came after Republicans had lost control of the floor during an earlier, unrelated vote, with several of their members defecting and several more absent. As the House chamber descended into chaos, leaders wary of risking another public defeat on a far more politically consequential vote abruptly scrapped the Iran war measure.

The move came just days after a similar resolution moved ahead in the Senate, when a handful of G.O.P. defectors broke from the president and opposed the war. That vote indicated an increasing willingness by some members of the president’s party to pressure him to end a conflict that a majority of Americans say is not worth the costs.

Last week, a similar measure failed in the House by the barest of margins — on a tie vote — leaving Republican leaders no room for more defections.

“They probably did it because they didn’t have the votes,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who last week sided with Democrats in favor of a similar resolution and said he had planned to do so again on Thursday. “I don’t think they’re going to have the votes when we get back.”

“The next time they bring it,” he added, “it’s passing.”

It was the fourth time Democrats had sought to challenge Mr. Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional approval since he initiated the current conflict in late February, but with both chambers scheduled for a weeklong recess in observance of Memorial Day, they will have to wait until Congress returns in June.

The delay left Republicans in control of Congress flummoxed and lamenting the dysfunction that has taken hold on Capitol Hill as they struggle to govern.

“All I want is just one normal day,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who in her role as the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, is in charge of controlling proceedings on the House floor. “Just give me one normal day.”

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Hard-Line Military Fraternity: Decision-making in Iran is guided by a small group of men associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

• How Iran Gained Leverage: Outmatched militarily, Iran used “triangular coercion” by attacking Gulf states and closing the Strait of Hormuz. It points to a long-term U.S. vulnerability.

• Early War Plan: An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, from house arrest in Tehran was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power. But the audacious plan quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.

• Opportunity for Syria: With multiple Mediterranean ports and borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, the country offers a desperately needed alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz.

• Secret Israeli Outposts: Israel spent over a year preparing a covert site in Iraq for its operations against Iran, regional officials said. Iraqi officials later confirmed the existence of a second base.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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Almost two miles beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean, a hydrothermal vent spews sulfur into the inky black waters. On its lip, a small snail is not only basking in the poison but converting it into a shell that is part iron. This gastropod is the scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), perhaps the world’s most metal animal.

Despite being so hardcore, the species has a precarious future. In 2019 the snail became the first species that lives on hydrothermal vents to be classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species—thanks to the threat of deep-sea mining companies that have been interested in harvesting the minerals at the vents that the snails call home.

For a long time, scientists presumed that the intense pressure and toxic compounds that erupt from Earth’s crust through hydrothermal vents would make these structures and the water around them incompatible with life. But in 2001, researchers found the snails living happily among a myriad of other creatures that thrive in these unforgiving environments. The snails’ iron-rich shell is a vital part of their survival strategy—but not as a protective armor, says Chong Chen, a senior scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and a leading expert on the scaly-foot snail, who led the effort to map its genome. Rather, the shell is almost like the human liver in that it helps remove toxins from the snails’ body, he explains.

The reason why has to do with how the snail gets its nutrients. This creature doesn’t eat in a conventional sense. Instead, like other species that live on hydrothermal vents, the snail is home to bacteria that feast on hydrogen sulfide, oxygen, and carbon dioxide and convert those chemicals into sugar. In exchange for providing the bacteria a home in its gut, the snail uses that sugar for energy. The bacteria’s digestion produces toxic sulfur as a by-product, however. To protect itself, the snail excretes the sulfur, which mixes with iron in the vent water. The end result is a shell that’s literally, albeit partially, made of metal, along with the tough scales that give the snail its name.

“The ‘iron armor’ is not for defense, as people thought for many years; instead, it is for symbiosis. The snail is totally happy without the iron armor, which is a by-product formed by the hot vent environment,” Chen says.

The snail, which is less than two inches long, has already inspired some technological innovations. The U.S. Army, for instance, has studied the snail’s scales for inspiration in designing new armor, and its chemical composition has sparked new ideas on how to make the pyrite nanoparticles found in solar panels.

Not only is the snail the single animal known to incorporate iron sulfide into its shell, but it also has evolved to only exist on eight sulfur-rich hydrothermal vents in the world. The amount of space on Earth that can be inhabited by the snail is so small that it amounts to roughly half the size of Disney World, says Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton in England.

The very same environment in which the snail evolved its signature feature is also what has made its future uncertain. Underwater hydrothermal vents form at the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates, where seawater is able to trickle down through the crust. That water is heated by magma below and shoots back upward, bringing with it precious minerals such as copper, zinc, and gold, along with the iron and sulfur found in the snail’s shell.

Those minerals have caught the attention of mining companies. Copper is particularly in demand because of its use in artificial intelligence data centers and green energy production. Although no deep-sea mining is yet underway in these areas, at least two of the vents that the snails live on have been considered for possible operations, according to the IUCN.

“There are rising concerns that if mining is permitted, the habitat could be severely reduced or destroyed,” the organization wrote in its Red List entry. The best way to protect the vents—and the snails—is to “just not mine active hydrothermal vents, period,” Chen says.

Instead, mining companies could target inactive vents, he says. “There are, for example, many inactive hydrothermal massive sulfide deposits in the Indian Ocean. These inactive vents no longer host the scaly-foot snail, and therefore mining these sites would not impact the snails,” Chen says. Still, such vents are no panacea, he adds. “We currently know very little about how unique the inactive vents themselves are in terms of biodiversity,” Chen says. “Ongoing research has found at least some animal groups that seem to be unique to inactive vents, so mining there might impact those animals.”

Aside from the snail’s contributions to modern armor and material sciences, Copley says, there are philosophical reasons to preserve the future of a creature that lives in an environment as alien and inaccessible to humans as any ecosystem on our planet. Few people will ever see a scaly-foot gastropod, but that doesn’t change their preciousness.

Chen is more pragmatic. The snail by itself may not affect humans, but its native ecosystem, while remote, is proving to play a larger role than previously suspected in the overall health of the ocean. The vents pump carbon and other nutrients into the water, and those nutrients sustain the beauty humans admire and the food they eat.

“We are now starting to understand that hydrothermal vents play key roles in regulating the supply of such elements to the ocean and therefore contributing significantly to the global biogeochemical cycles that we all rely on,” Chen says. “The world is one connected planet, more than one might realize. We are now living in the consequences of deforestation’s impacts on the climate, which we did not realize when it began. Mining hot spots like hydrothermal vents may lead to a similar impact.”

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Three people have died, and more than a dozen first responders have been hospitalized following a possible hazmat situation in New Mexico.

At around 11:00 a.m., local time, Wednesday, New Mexico State Police rushed to a home in Mountainair for a “suspected overdose,” according to authorities.

Four people inside the home were found “unresponsive,” and three of them have since been confirmed dead, the state police said in a Facebook post.

Eighteen first responders were exposed to an “unidentified substance” and taken to the hospital along with the other person inside the home, authorities said. Several first responders have since been released.

The first responders experienced symptoms including nausea and dizziness, after being exposed to the substance, according to state police. Two of them were in serious condition as of Wednesday afternoon.

At least one person inside the home was revived with Narcan, Torrance County Sheriff David Frazee said in an article published by the Santa Fe New Mexican. Narcan is used to try to save people suspected of overdosing on an opioid.

“Evidently, they must have inhaled some toxins or something from the scene,” Frazee said of the first responders.

Mountainair Mayor Peter Nieto said the first responders had “direct contact with the individual who passed, and they were feeling lightheaded, headaches, nausea, things like that,” per the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Nieto said in a Facebook post that while the exact cause of the incident is currently unknown, “all indications are pointing toward narcotics as a possible factor.”

The first responders and the one person inside the home who was still alive were taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital. They are being “quarantined, evaluated, and monitored,” state police said.

New Mexico State Police arrived at the home to help the Torrance County Sheriff’s Office. It’s unclear how many members of each agency were affected by the unknown substance.

Three of the four EMTs from Mountainair EMS have been released from the hospital, Nieto said in a follow-up Facebook post.

EMS Chief Josh Lewis, who was the first to enter the home, will remain in the hospital overnight for observation, the mayor said.

“We are incredibly thankful that the other responders have been released,” Nieto said. “While they are not yet fully recovered, they are doing much better.”

Some Torrance County EMTs and hospital nurses who came into contact with people who were at the home also experienced symptoms, according to the mayor.

“We are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers and wishing them a full and speedy recovery,” Nieto said.

Albuquerque Fire Rescue Hazmat teams are working to identify the substance. Investigators believe it may be spread through contact rather than being airborne, according to authorities.

Mountainair Public Works confirmed that the substance was not carbon monoxide or related to natural gas.

Authorities said they secured a perimeter around the home and that there is “no threat to the public.”

“We ask the public to avoid the area and keep all affected individuals and first responders in their thoughts,” state police said.

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Three dead, more injured after possible hazmat situation in New Mexico

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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privately held rocket and satellite maker, has long been something of a financial mystery, even as it became synonymous with audacious plans to reach the stars.

That changed on Wednesday, when the company revealed just how lucrative its rocket launch and satellite internet businesses have been.

SpaceX’s revenue soared to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier, the company disclosed in a filing required of firms that are seeking to go public. In the first three months of this year, revenue rose to $4.7 billion from $4.1 billion in the same period a year ago.

But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, as capital expenditures nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX lost almost as much money as all of 2025, recording a $4.3 billion loss.

SpaceX, which also owns the social media platform X and xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, drew back the curtain on its finances for the first time as it prepares for what could be one of the largest initial public offerings to date. The company, which values itself at $1.25 trillion, is aiming to reach the stock market as early as next month and could try to raise $50 billion to $75 billion from the offering.

If successful, SpaceX’s I.P.O. could pave the way for other enormous offerings, including from the A.I. companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which is also preparing to file confidentially for an I.P.O. in the coming weeks. Last week, Cerebras, an A.I. chip maker, kicked off the expected wave of offerings and rose 68 percent on its first day of trading, becoming the largest public offering so far this year and the biggest of any technology firm since 2019.

A strong public markets debut for SpaceX would bring generational riches to Wall Street, the company’s employees, and, of course, Mr. Musk, who is already the world’s richest person and could become its first trillionaire.

Mr. Musk and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

How closely Mr. Musk is tied with SpaceX was made clearer in the filing. He owns around 50 percent of the company’s shares outstanding and controls more than 85 percent of the shareholder votes because of a class of super-voting shares, according to the filing. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, was the only other executive listed in the filing to hold a seven-figure chunk of the super-voting shares.

Based on SpaceX’s current $1.25 trillion valuation, Mr. Musk’s ownership stake is worth more than $635 billion.

“SpaceX is his company,” Jay Ritter, an I.P.O. expert at the University of Florida, said of Mr. Musk’s stake.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX has grown into one of the world’s leading space companies by developing partly reusable rockets with the goal of eventually taking humans to Mars and making people multiplanetary. In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, which already owned X. Since then, he has expanded the company’s goals, declaring that SpaceX would build artificial intelligence data centers that orbit Earth, create a facility to manufacture complex A.I. chips, and develop human colonies on the moon.

Potential investors would be financing those moonshots, which have drawn skepticism given Mr. Musk’s optimistic timelines for these goals. The billionaire has also shifted SpaceX’s focus in recent months from taking humans to Mars.

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A successful SpaceX offering would bring riches to Wall Street, the company’s employees, and, of course, Elon Musk, who is already the world’s richest person. Credit…Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

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Does a ginkgo tree have an inner world? In the film Silent Friend, the protagonist, a neurologist who studies brain activity in infants, attempts to quantify the internal signaling of a ginkgo tree on a university campus. By the end of the movie, he’s using computer-generated visualizations to look at how the tree responds to its environment—not exactly becoming its “friend” but getting a touch closer to understanding the tree’s experience of its surroundings. The film isn’t based on a real study—if plants do have anything like consciousness, scientists have yet to formally describe it—but it’s an imaginative exploration of how consciousness might manifest in different forms of life.

Ildikó Enyedi—Silent Friend’s writer and director, and a self-described amateur science enthusiast—says that the film was largely inspired by real research that has shown that consciousness isn’t solely a human phenomenon. Coming closer to the internal worlds of plants, Enyedi says, “helps us to move out from this instinctive position that our perception is the default.”

Researchers tend to define consciousness loosely as the ability to experience—the subjective, ineffable feeling of being alive. This involves some combination of being awake and aware, having internal awareness (such as mental imagery and inner thoughts), and being connected to the world with an ability to perceive stimuli.

Many cultures around the world have long thought of nonhuman animals as having something like consciousness; some even presume plants have it, too. But in the Western scientific tradition, starting with philosopher René Descartes, the idea of nonhuman consciousness has been questioned—and frequently dismissed.

When the New Age movement started to take hold internationally in the 1970s, some scientists tried to test whether plants really could “think.” Documented and popularized by the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, this research came to some far-fetched conclusions, purporting to show that plants “enjoy” classical music and can “read your mind.” Many of the studies referred to in the book weren’t reproducible, though, and scientists rejected them for their lack of rigor. Some claim the studies severely damaged the credibility of future investigations of how plants sense and react to their environments. Still, Enyedi says that this wave of research, which occurred when she was a teenager in the 1970s, got her interested in different definitions of consciousness that could apply outside of the animal kingdom.

The start of the 21st century saw a shift in consciousness research, when scientists began using the tools of neuroscience to try to understand consciousness. Techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which relies on electrical signals, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which utilizes blood flow, were employed to measure how the brain responds to its environment. With this data, scientists can draw inferences about consciousness.

Today, researchers understand that plants, animals, human adults, and young children have different perceptive worlds. Maybe plants don’t hear or see like humans do, but studies show that they can respond to sounds and mimic shapes and colors. Plants can even “communicate” with one another using underground fungi networks, according to recent research; these hidden networks convey nutrients from one plant to another and transfer messages that initiate chemical defense responses against pests. Other tantalizing clues—such as early evidence that plants can “pay attention” to stimuli via the synchronization of internal electric signals, causing them to activate resilience during a drought or identify potential hosts, among other responses—are pushing scientists to continue investigating how plants experience the world.

Anil Seth is a neurologist at the University of Sussex in England whose work focuses on the cognitive processes of consciousness. He says that just because plenty of creatures can’t, for instance, speak or recognize themselves in a mirror, that doesn’t mean scientists should assume they’re not conscious in their own way.

“We’re trying to get indicators [of consciousness] that are meaningful for the populations we might apply them to,” Seth says. Brain activity, speech or movement are indicators of consciousness in humans. But “different indicators might be more meaningful for nonhuman animals, plants, AI systems, synthetic biology systems like organoids, and so on.”

Silent Friend attempts to link the mysteries of human and plant sensory worlds using the trappings of science, but with an added creative component. While the film embraces artistic embellishments of the science, Seth, with whom Enyedi consulted during the early creative phases of the film, feels it’s an example of how the arts can push the consciousness conversation in new directions.

The fundamental challenge of studying consciousness remains: it’s hard to tell what consciousness is when you can only experience your own version of it. Scientists, in their quest to gather reliable data, have had to boil down consciousness to only factors that can be measured through experiments. “The data about experiences are necessarily indirect,” Seth says. “Part of the reason why film and books are so good [is] because they can do more to flesh out the nature of experiences, in some ways.”

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Xi Jinping welcomed Russian president Vladimir Putin with pomp and pageantry as the pair kicked off talks in the Great Hall of the People on Wednesday morning, days after the Chinese leader hosted Donald Trump in the same location.

Chinese soldiers stood in position as a military band played the Russian and Chinese national anthems for the leaders in central Beijing. Children waving Russian and Chinese flags and cheered “Welcome, welcome!” in Chinese, before the pair entered the Great Hall.

The scene was reminiscent of Trump’s high-profile meeting with Xi in Beijing last week, when the leaders of the world’s two largest economies discussed issues from trade and investment, to the Iran conflict and Taiwan.

Talks between Xi and Putin began with a shorter so-called “narrow format meeting”, featuring fewer delegates to discuss sensitive issues, before both leaders held a “wide format meeting” with their delegations. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, who greeted Putin when he landed in Beijing on Tuesday evening, is also expected to hold talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

Chinese state media reported that Xi, in his opening remarks, said the two countries should help one another with national development and revitalisation, adding that the world is in danger of reverting back to the “law of the jungle”.

In his opening remarks, Putin hailed the countries’ relationship as being at an unprecedented level, as he stated that Moscow remained a “reliable energy supplier” amid the ongoing Middle East crisis. Putin also invited Xi to visit Russia next year.

Xi said further hostilities in the Middle East were “inadvisable”, and that a “comprehensive ceasefire is of utmost urgency”, state media reported.

Reciprocal trade and investment are likely to be top of the agenda for Putin as his sanctions-hit economy suffers under the growing cost of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

As Xi was preparing to welcome Putin, the Chinese commerce ministry confirmed China will buy 200 Boeing jets and seek an extension of the trade agreement with the US that was reached in Kuala Lumpur last year. The statement marked Beijing’s first confirmation of the Boeing order, which Trump alluded to last week.

The setting and manner of Xi’s encounters with other world leaders is often viewed as a signal of the Chinese president’s regard for his guest, with the optics and outcomes of his meeting with Putin to come under added scrutiny, coming so soon after Trump’s visit.

In contrast to the adversarial nature of Washington and Beijing’s relationship, Putin and Xi have signalled an increasingly warm bond over recent years, with the leaders labelling one another “dear” ⁠and “old” friends.

When the Chinese leader last hosted his Russian counterpart in May 2024, the pair seemed at ease as they ditched their ties and spoke over tea in a former imperial garden that now houses Chinese Communist party offices.

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Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

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