James' World 2

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Jimmy Kimmel is back hosting late-night TV, and President Trump has some big feelings about it.

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A pair of diamonds that formed hundreds of kilometers deep in Earth’s malleable mantle both contain specks of materials that form in completely opposing chemical environments—a combination so unusual that researchers thought their coexistence was “almost impossible.” The substances’ presence provides a window into the chemical goings-on of the mantle and the reactions that form diamonds.

The two diamond samples were found in a South African mine. As with plenty of other precious gemstones, they contain what are called inclusions—tiny bits of surrounding rocks captured as the diamonds form. These inclusions are loathed by most jewelers but are an exciting source of information for scientists. That’s especially true when diamonds form deep in the unreachable mantle, because they carry these inclusions basically undisturbed to the surface—the only way those minerals can rise hundreds of kilometers without being altered from their original deep-mantle state.

The two new diamond samples each contain inclusions of carbonate minerals that are rich in oxygen atoms (a state known as oxidized) and oxygen-poor nickel alloys (a state known as reduced, in the parlance of chemistry). Much like how an acid and a base immediately react to form water and a salt, oxidized carbonate minerals and reduced metals don’t coexist for long. Typically, diamond inclusions show just one or the other, so the presence of both perplexed Yaakov Weiss, a senior lecturer in Earth sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his colleagues, so much so that they initially put the samples aside for a year in confusion, he says

But when they reanalyzed the diamonds, the researchers realized that the inclusions capture a snapshot of the reaction that made the sparkling stones and confirm for the first time that diamonds can form when carbonate minerals and reduced metals in the mantle react. The new samples are the first time scientists have ever seen the midpoint of that reaction captured in a natural diamond.

“It’s basically two sides of the [oxidation] spectrum,” says Weiss, the senior author of the new study describing the find, which was published on Monday in Nature Geoscience.

The find has implications for what lies in the mantle’s mysterious middle. As you travel deeper into the earth, away from the surface, the rocks and minerals become increasingly reduced, with fewer and fewer oxygen molecules available, but there is little direct evidence of this shift from the mantle.

Theoretical calculations have given researchers a notion of how the planet shifts from oxidized to reduced with depth. “We knew about that reduction with some empirical data, with real samples down to maybe 200 kilometers,” says Maya Kopylova, a professor of Earth, ocean, and atmospheric science at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the new study but who wrote an editorial accompanying the paper. “What happened below 200 km [was] just our idea, our models, because it’s so difficult to get the

materials.” There are only a few samples from below this depth, she said.

These new samples, which come from between 280 and 470 km below Earth’s surface, provide the first real-world fact-check on this theoretical mantle chemistry. One finding, Weiss says, is that oxidized melted material exists deeper than expected. Kimberlites, the erupted rocks that bring diamonds to the surface, are oxidized, so researchers had thought they couldn’t originate much below 300 km of depth. But these findings suggest that oxidized rocks occur deeper than that, and thus so might kimberlite rocks.

Diamond-forming reactions likely happen when carbonate fluids are dragged down by subducting tectonic plates, which bring oxygen-heavy minerals in contact with the metal alloys of the mantle, Weiss says. (Another way chemists think diamonds may form is by precipitating out of carbon-rich fluids that cool as they rise upward in the mantle, like sugar crystalizing from syrup. The new paper doesn’t rule out that process happening as well.)

The nickel-rich inclusions might also help explain an odd occurrence in some diamonds: occasional atoms of nickel seem to replace the carbon of these diamonds’ crystal lattice. That’s been a mystery, Kopylova says, because nickel is so much heavier than carbon that it shouldn’t be able to easily swap into the crystal structure. “Now, looking at these data, I see that it might be just a sign of diamond formation at certain depths,” she says. “That would be very interesting to investigate further.”

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The Supreme Court upended the constitutional separation of powers on Friday afternoon with a brief order allowing Donald Trump to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress. In an apparent 6–3 decision, the conservative supermajority greenlit Trump’s so-called “pocket rescission,” ensuring that the money will expire before its intended beneficiaries receive it. It offered a single page of vague, threadbare justification, suggesting that the president’s authority over foreign affairs outweighs Congress’ control over spending.

This view marks a radical rewriting of the Constitution that shifts a massive amount of power from the legislative branch to the executive. It essentially awards Trump a line-item veto over any part of the budget that is remotely connected to foreign policy—and, quite possibly, every dollar appropriated by Congress. And the court did all this without full briefing, oral argument, or a signed ruling, abusing the shadow docket yet again to hand Trump one of the biggest wins of his second term so far.

Friday’s decision in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition revolves around $4 billion that Congress explicitly appropriated to fund various programs overseas. Lawmakers committed the money to, among other things, democracy-building work, election integrity, climate resilience projects, and gender equality initiatives. But the Trump administration refused to disburse it to its intended recipients, claiming that it was not “aligned with the foreign policy of the president.”

This executive withholding of an appropriation is called an impoundment, and it is flatly illegal. In 1974, after many tussles with Richard Nixon over this issue, Congress enacted the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) to prevent future administrations from canceling money that it had appropriated. Under the law, a president must seek Congress’ permission to rescind “discretionary” spending, and give a reason for his request. If Congress does not grant permission within 45 days, the executive branch must spend the money.

But Trump insists that he has discovered a loophole in the ICA, which his Justice Department calls a “pocket rescission.” The administration sat on the $4 billion in aid until the final 45 days of the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, when the money will lapse. Then, less than 45 days out from that deadline, he sent Congress a letter asking to cancel the funds under the ICA. Congress will not approve this impoundment. But Trump contends that, because he has asked permission, he can simply refuse to spend the money until the fiscal year ends—then let it expire forever.

In response to this gambit, several intended beneficiaries of the aid filed a lawsuit demanding that the government pay out the money. Lower courts ruled in their favor, holding that the Trump administration cannot manipulate the ICA from a restriction on impoundment to a license for impoundment. So the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief. And, predictably, the Republican-appointed justices provided it on Friday in an unsigned shadow docket order.

The majority essentially offered two sentences of explanation. First, it held that the ICA likely “precludes” the parties’ suit “to enforce the appropriations at issue here.” Second, the president had a stronger claim of injury, because “the asserted harms to the executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appears to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents.” Both of these conclusions are astoundingly backward, which may be why the majority did not try to flesh them out: to describe the majority’s reasoning is to refute it.

Start with the notion that the ICA bars private plaintiffs from suing to receive appropriations to which they are entitled. At the outset, this theory should raise an eyebrow, since it harms the very parties—victims of illegal impoundments—that the law was designed to help. But set that aside. The majority seems to think that private plaintiffs can’t sue because the ICA explicitly empowers only one party, the Comptroller General, to sue over impoundments. That’s what Trump’s Justice Department argued. (As Justice Elena Kagan noted in dissent, though, it only adopted this argument recently, and took the opposite position just last month.)

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Win McNamee/Getty Images and Al Drago/Getty Images.

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In Georgia, federal investigators are seeking records related to travel they believe Ms. Willis took abroad around the time of last year’s election, but it was not immediately clear why. The inquiry is being led by the office of Theodore S. Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis, said Friday that “we have no comment beyond the fact we have no knowledge of any investigation.”

Mr. Hertzberg’s office did not have any immediate comment.

The case that Ms. Willis brought against Mr. Trump and his allies, which accused them of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and subvert the will of voters, is in limbo. Last year, a state appeals court disqualified her from overseeing the case after revelations that she had a personal relationship with the lawyer she had hired to run it, Nathan Wade. Defense lawyers accused Ms. Willis of “self-dealing” by going on vacations with Mr. Wade that he had paid for, at least in part.

Those travels took place in 2022 and 2023. But the current subpoena is seeking details of travel in the fall of 2024, around the time of last year’s election.

Last week, the Georgia Supreme Court declined to take up her appeal on the disqualification matter, leaving the case against Mr. Trump and his allies unlikely to proceed anytime soon, if at all.

After the ruling, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that Ms. Willis and others who brought or tried to bring criminal or civil cases against him “are now CRIMINALS who will hopefully pay serious consequences for their illegal actions.” He has put increasing pressure on the Justice Department, shattering the agency’s tradition of keeping the president at arm’s length. On Friday, he predicted more indictments of “corrupt radical left Democrats” were coming.

“There’ll be others,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he left the White House to attend the Ryder Cup golf championship on Long Island.

Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case include Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; Rudy Giuliani, the president’s onetime personal lawyer; and David Shafer, the former head of the Republican Party in Georgia.

The original multicount indictment, which was handed up in August 2023, accused Mr. Trump and a number of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the election results in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost in 2020. Part of the basis for the indictment was a phone call Mr. Trump had made in January 2021 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, asking Mr. Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results.

Mr. Trump had to go to Atlanta to get booked in the city’s jail in 2023.

Ms. Willis is a Democrat who won re-election in November. She has said repeatedly that she did nothing wrong.

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The Department of Justice is seeking information on Fani T. Willis, the Georgia district attorney who charged President Trump in an election interference case. Above, Ms. Willis in Atlanta in 2023.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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Scientists have made monumental strides in their quest to protect vulnerable babies from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV): in just the past few years, monoclonal antibody injections for infants and a maternal vaccine that delivers protection through the placenta have substantially reduced infant hospitalizations and deaths.

But researchers still are grasping at a broader goal: to make a vaccine available for toddlers and preschoolers, who are also vulnerable to severe RSV disease.

That breakthrough, medical researchers say, could be right around the corner.

The most promising candidate is a two-dose vaccine administered as a nasal spray. Should it prove safe and effective in clinical trials, which are currently underway, it could help prevent severe RSV disease in children over the first several years of their lives—not just the first months.

“Where we’re heading next is the possibility of having true vaccines, not monoclonal antibodies, for kids after their first birthday,” says James Campbell, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Maryland.

Before the arrival in 2023 of Pfizer’s maternal vaccine and a preventive monoclonal antibody drug called nirsevimab, developed by Sanofi and AstraZeneca, RSV brought an annual scourge upon children’s hospitals. Historically, it has been the number one cause of infant hospitalization; about 2 to 3 percent of infants in their first year of life are hospitalized with RSV each year in the U.S.

During the fall and early winter, RSV “fills up our hospitals with sick children and may potentially have long-term ramifications in terms of a higher likelihood of wheezing,” says Jennifer Nayak, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “The fact that there are prevention strategies out there … has actually moved the landscape quite far in this area.”

A second monoclonal antibody, Merck’s clesrovimab, was approved for use in infants this year.

The monoclonal antibodies and maternal vaccination both protect babies through passive immunization, which means the infants are given antibodies. For RSV, the antibodies are either directly injected as nirsevimab or clesrovimab, or passed through the placenta after the vaccine is given during pregnancy. Those antibodies are ready to fight the disease, but they eventually wear off. Because infants do not receive a vaccine that prompts their immune systems to make their own antibodies—known as active immunity—they aren’t primed to fight RSV after the passively received antibodies have waned.

“Unlike active immunization, where you establish immune memory, passive immunization doesn’t do that,” Nayak says.

And while RSV is the most dangerous to babies, it’s far from harmless in older kids.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of data from two different groups of children in the U.S. revealed this stark reality. In it, scientists found that RSV-related hospitalization rates among infants seven months and younger decreased by about 28 and 43 percent, respectively, during the peak of the 2024–2025 RSV season, when both preventatives were available, compared with pre-COVID-pandemic RSV seasons from 2018 to 2020.

Those same statistics also underscored the ongoing vulnerability of older children: While RSV-related hospitalizations declined in infants, they increased in older kids. For children aged eight months to 19 months, hospitalization rates from RSV were 26 and 34 percent higher in the two groups, respectively, in the 2024–2025 season than they were in 2018–2020. In one of the cohorts, the hospitalization rate rose from five per 1,000 children to nearly seven. Hospitalization rates for 20- to 59-month-olds in the two groups were 1.7 and 2.5 per 1,000 children, 55 and 67 percent higher than they were in those prepandemic seasons.

The existing passive immunization products are reducing the impact on infants, but “what we want to do for them after that is going to be the question,” Campbell says. “We all know that in the second and third season, there is still a burden in two-year-olds and three-year-olds.”

The disease is even more deadly in low- and middle-income countries that don’t have the resources to provide supportive care to children with severe infections. Worldwide, RSV is responsible for more than 3.6 million hospitalizations and about 100,000 deaths in children under age five each year, according to the World Health Organization.

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Chiara Vercesi

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Newly appointed acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan presented the case to secure the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on her own, according to a source familiar with the grand jury proceedings in Alexandria, Virginia, on Thursday.

Tapped for the acting role just three days earlier, Halligan’s action came after a senior Justice Department official told NBC News that career prosecutors in Halligan’s office sent her a memo documenting why they believed probable cause did not exist to secure an indictment against Comey.

The appointment of Halligan, who was on President Donald Trump’s defense team in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case prior to his election to a second term, followed the resignation of acting U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert last Friday after pressure grew from the White House to prosecute Comey.

Time was of the essence in bringing an indictment: A five-year statute of limitations on the charges against the former FBI director was set to expire early next week.

Halligan and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.

The indictment charged Comey with making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Halligan was also the only prosecutor to sign the indictment. It is highly unusual for the U.S. attorney to not assign assistant prosecutors to a case for grand jury presentation.

The charges stem from testimony Comey delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, in response to questioning about who authorized an information leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016. Comey was asked whether he stood by earlier testimony from 2017 denying that he’d authorized his deputy, Andrew McCabe, to approve the leak, and he responded, “I stand by the testimony.”

A 2018 Justice Department inspector general’s report quoted McCabe as saying he did not recall discussing the disclosure with Comey in advance of authorizing it, although it was possible that he did, but when he told Comey after the article came out, he “did not react negatively.”

The inspector general said Comey denied McCabe ever told him he was responsible for the leak, and the report found that McCabe’s account had changed over time and he “lacked candor.” The report ultimately found the leak had been authorized by McCabe “without consulting Comey.”

Court records show that the grand jury declined to indict Comey on a third count, which was related to his testifying at the hearing that he didn’t remember being told of a “plan” involving two unidentified people and the 2016 election. The filing also shows an apparent typographical error listing that third count again as “count two.”

In a statement Thursday night, Halligan said the “charges as alleged in this represent a breach of the public trust at an extraordinary level.”

Comey declared his innocence in a video post on Instagram Thursday night.

“My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent,” he said. “So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”

The indictment came just days after Trump posted on social media that Attorney General Pam Bondi should take action against Comey and two of the president’s other adversaries, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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