James' World 2

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On Friday, a federal judge in Florida took a motion from 35 former federal judges very seriously. She ordered President Trump to respond to their request that she reopen a case the administration had used as a vehicle to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate his allies and to shield him from tax audits and liabilities.

The former judges said the asserted settlement of the case was the product of collusion and fraud. That argument has been made far and wide, but it may have taken on special force coming from people who, as they put it in their motion, “have dedicated their professional lives to the administration of justice.”

It is possible, of course, that the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams of the Federal District Court in Miami, would have taken similar actions without outside prompting or spurred by someone else’s filing. But she seemed to welcome a motion from her former peers.

‘The Federal Judges Are Infuriated’

Even larger groups of former judges have filed supporting briefs in other cases.

In a Supreme Court case on protections for immigrants, more than 175 former judges filed a brief in March arguing that the court’s emergency orders do not count as precedent binding lower courts if the justices did not give reasons. Recent emergency orders have tended to come with explanations.

In May, more than 100 former judges urged the federal appeals court in Boston to address what they called a pattern of abuse by immigration officials, including moving detained immigrants around the country to thwart court challenges and “a broader pattern of disrespect by ICE for judicial process and orders.” The case is pending.

Harold Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, is among the lawyers for the former judges in the Boston case.

“I thought we’d get about 20 judges, which is still impressive, and instead we got 135,” he said, adding that the surge of interest was driven by a threat to the rule of law.

“This is no longer about ICE versus the detainees,” Professor Koh said. “It’s about ICE versus the courts. The federal judges are infuriated.”

Perhaps the most prominent of the retired judges, Michael Luttig, signed all three of those briefs. Judge Luttig was appointed to a federal appeals court by President George H.W. Bush, served for 15 years, and was considered for a seat on the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush.

He is now a harsh critic of the Trump administration, and he said current and former judges must speak up.

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President Trump at the White House last month. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Even casual basketball fans know that Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama is a phenom. At a towering seven feet, four inches tall, the San Antonio Spurs forward-center is among the National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) top defenders at the net and a serious threat on offense—often attempting five or more three-point shots per game. His combination of height, agility, and all-around basketball prowess are so out of this world, in fact, that some fans have even taken to calling him “the Alien.”

In the ongoing playoffs, his three-point shooting has been on full display. In the first game of the best-of-seven NBA Western Conference Finals earlier this month, for instance, Wembanyama hit a deep three to tie the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder (OKC) with less than a minute remaining on the clock in overtime. Wembanyama and the Spurs won the game in double overtime.

Whichever team wins this series will take on the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals in June. Ahead of the Spurs and OKC’s Game 6 match on Thursday—which the Spurs won—Scientific American spoke with experts in physics and biomechanics about the science of Wemby’s epic shots to find out: How does the tallest player in the NBA keep hitting all those threes?

The science of Wemby

The NBA’s tallest players typically aren’t known for taking such deep shots as Wemby. “He’s just launching that thing,” says Larry Silverberg, an emeritus professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “It’s extremely unique,” he says.

A lot goes into making a three-point basketball shot. For one, there’s the player: their height, the size of their hands and arms and the mechanics of their movement affect the shot. There’s also the aim of the ball, as well as its backspin, speed, and angle of release, Silverberg explains. All these factors and more come together in determining the success of a shot.

All things being equal, experts say that height is typically thought of as an advantage on the court because taller players are physically closer to the basket ring, which stands at 10 feet above the ground, and they are harder for smaller players to block. In other words, If the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry, one of the best three-point shooters of all time, was seven feet, four inches instead of six feet, two inches, he’d likely have an even greater shooting advantage. A 2008 study by Silverberg and a co-author suggested that free-throw shooters who release the ball from a higher starting point likely have greater accuracy, “as long as this does not adversely affect the player’s launch consistency.”

Taller players should, in theory, be better shooters, but that doesn’t always translate in a real-life setting, says Dimitrije Cabarkapa. A former collegiate basketball player, Cabarkapa is associate director of the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory at the University of Kansas, which is part of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a research institute dedicated to improving human health.

In part, that may be because the NBA’s so-called big guys usually aren’t encouraged to specialize in shooting threes at an early age, and sometimes it also comes down to an individual player’s coordination and mechanics, Cabarkapa says.

“Many tall players have difficulty with these shots because their long arms can make the shooting motion harder to coordinate consistently,” says Amy Pope, a principal lecturer in physics and astronomy at Clemson University.

For Wemby, that problem doesn’t appear to be an issue: “When Victor Wembanyama shoots a successful three-pointer, what stands out to me is his body mechanics,” Pope says. “His torso stays nearly vertical. Many shorter shooters need a stronger upward jump and more forward momentum to get the necessary range. Wembanyama’s release point is so high that he does not need this large boost from his legs, giving his body a straight appearance.” In fact, all he needs for the right exit velocity is “a small vertical jump,” she says.

Wemby is also notably flexible, which can be its own advantage. For the best shooting proficiency, research by Cabarkapa and his colleagues shows that three-point shooting starts from the “bottom up.” “You’ve got to put your butt closer to the ground, keep your torso in near vertical position, and make sure that your elbow is tucked under the basketball,” he says. It also helps to have greater “flexion,” or bend, in your hips, knees, and ankles.

“If somebody doesn’t have a proper range of motion in the knee or hip joint, they may not be able to achieve enough flexion in those joints, which is necessary to generate force and perform an efficient shooting motion,” he says. And some skills, of course, go beyond biomechanics.

“[Wembanyama] knows he’s seven-foot-four. He knows that people generally are not going to block him, but he goes the extra mile. He says, ‘I’m going to take it from even further out,’” Silverberg says. “Besides being tall, agile, and skilled, he’s even being a little bit creative there by deciding to work on a shot that nobody else would. I think that’s pretty neat.”

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The primal human experience of gazing into an unblemished cosmos is vanishing, being replaced by a dense, industrial field of 15,000 orbiting satellites with plans for half a million more by 2040.

A few minutes after the sun retreated behind the Olympic Mountains, we spotted our first satellite. It moved across the sky with an eerie persistence, like a car on cruise control.  

“That’s low Earth orbit. That’s pretty standard speed,” Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington and my stargazing guide for the night, tells me.

The primal human experience of gazing into a dark, unblemished night sky — something we’ve been doing for at least 32,000 years, since our ancestors carved Orion onto a mammoth tusk — is vanishing. That nocturnal vista is becoming a dense, industrial field of orbiting debris. 

“I tell people, go to a dark site and see the sky now, while it’s like this,” Rawls says, gesturing to the constellations above us. She lets out a laugh. “It’s like, oh my God, what are we doing?”

The scale is hard to overstate. At the turn of the century, there were just over 700 active satellites in space. Now, with plans for hundreds of thousands more satellites — going from 15,000 today to half a million by 2040 — the new space race is not just a visual nuisance, it’s a toxic threat to our existence. 

When you look up at the night sky and wonder why the stars are moving, it’s not because you’re seeing a UFO. You’re likely looking at a satellite, and two out of every three belong to Elon Musk’s Starlink. 

Starlink is capable of beaming an internet connection to a dish the size of a pizza box, virtually anywhere in the world. The company’s on track for the largest initial public offering in history, largely on the back of all those satellites cruising through the skies. 

When Starlink launched its first satellite in 2019, it kicked off a gold rush in space. Amazon plans to send up 60,000 of its own satellites, Chinese companies nearly 60,000 more. Everyone across the globe, it seems, wants a piece of the sky. Rwanda alone applied for 337,320 satellites. In January, Starlink filed for a million orbital AI data centers. 

Spacefaring countries are technically bound by the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but commercial enterprises are another story. And with space increasingly seen as a new theater of war, many nation-states are racing to launch their own mega-constellations.

In this article:

• 15,000 satellites: How we got here
• A million data centers in space?
• ‘The new theater of defense’
• What scientists are concerned about
• Earth’s atmosphere as a space dump
• Satellites maneuver to avoid collisions
• Space junk doesn’t always stay in space
• Taking out the orbital trash
• Wild West: Who is governing the satellite ecosystem?
• Why satellites are here to stay

The ripple effects are as far-reaching as they are uncertain. 

Satellites are expected to disrupt the migratory patterns of birds, dung beetles, and seals, which use the stars to navigate. 

Space junk from rocket launches and old satellites falls to Earth every day, increasingly through busy airspace. Last year, a piece of titanium and carbon fiber the size of a car tire landed near a school in Argentina.

Many tons of aluminum and lithium aerosols are added to the atmosphere when satellites reach the end of their lives and burn up, eating away at the ozone layer and potentially accelerating climate change.  

And, ironically, they’re also threatening to halt space exploration in its tracks, as thousands of satellites zooming at 17,000 miles per hour push us toward a chain reaction known as the Kessler syndrome, an apocalyptic feedback loop in which one collision could create thousands of pieces of debris that would then lead to more collisions.

You cannot remove all these billions of small fragments from orbit. This will basically limit our access to space forever,” says Hanno Rein, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. “This is not going to go away. These small fragments will not necessarily deorbit quickly. They will stay there and make space inaccessible for future generations.”

As I part ways with Rawls, she seems cautiously pleased with how few satellites we saw. 

“A real takeaway from our observing session is that there are not yet an overwhelming number of bright satellites,” she says. “I hope you enjoyed your relatively pristine night sky experience.”

I get the feeling that I’m being told to enjoy it while it lasts.

15,000 satellites: How we got here

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite in 1957. It would take another 53 years before we passed 1,000 active satellites. Just 16 years after that, we passed 15,000.

Almost all of that growth is due to one company. When SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, there were only around 2,000 active satellites. It currently has more than 10,000 in orbit; the next closest operator is OneWeb, with 650. An average of 11 satellites have been launched every day in 2026, and with each one, the risk of collisions that generate dangerous space debris increases.

The causes for the prodigious satellite rise are complicated, but if I had to point to a single moment, I’d choose Dec. 22, 2015, the day that SpaceX landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the first time.

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Hmmmm … By default, only so-called whites are promoted, anything to distract from Epstein!

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No female officers were included on the new one-star list, which was released publicly in late May, despite the fact that women make up about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. The list appears to include only two nonwhite officers, even though sailors who identify as racial minorities make up about 38 percent of the active-duty Navy.

Mr. Hegseth’s removal of the officers from the one-star list is highly unusual, said the current and former defense officials. According to Pentagon rules, the defense secretary is supposed to pull officers from the list only for moral, mental, physical or professional failings that raise questions about the officers’ fitness to lead.

Mr. Hegseth’s actions are the latest in a series of firings and personnel interventions that appear to be driven by his anti-diversity politics rather than the officers’ performance. Taken together, they could reshape the military’s top ranks for years to come.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to say why Mr. Hegseth pulled the officers off the Navy one-star list. “Military promotions are given to those who have earned them,” Mr. Parnell said. “The department will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions.” The Navy declined to comment.

Since taking office, Mr. Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior military officers as part of a broader campaign designed to purge the Pentagon of leaders he has disparaged as “foolish,” “reckless,” and “woke.” He has consistently refused to explain why he has chosen to fire officers or pull them from promotion lists.

His scrutiny has fallen heavily on female and minority officers, who have borne the brunt of the dismissals. Nearly 60 percent of the senior officers Mr. Hegseth has fired are female or Black, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in recent Senate testimony. Women and minorities currently account for fewer than 20 percent of all generals and admirals.

“You are hollowing out the military’s bench of experience and highest-performing senior officers, while making young officers wonder if they should continue to serve,” Mr. Reed told Mr. Hegseth at another recent hearing.

Among those dismissed were Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s removal of at least seven officers from the list appears to violate rules governing the promotion system, according to current and former defense officials. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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Unseasonably hot weather in Europe has already claimed at least 18 lives. And history shows more are likely on the way

Stark new data show how much the spring heat wave that has been affecting much of Western Europe has shattered temperature records. The heat has been linked to 12 deaths in the U.K. alone. Three occurred on Wednesday and Thursday, when three teenage boys died in separate water incidents while they sought reprieve from temperatures that beat the previous records by several degrees in portions of the nation.

The gravity of the situation can be seen in an image captured by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite, which is used to monitor surface temperatures, on May 26. The areas in red are indicative of temperatures well in excess of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) and include major European cities such as Madrid and Paris.

The heat wave has broken a “remarkable number” of records for temperature, the U.K.’s Met Office said in a statement. Some 23 weather stations across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have reported temperatures exceeding the previous U.K.-wide record of 32.8 degrees C (91 degrees F), which was set in 1922 and 1944. On Tuesday, a research station in London’s Kew Gardens recorded temperatures of 35.1 degrees C (95.2 degrees F), obliterating its previous record of 29.3 degrees C (84.7 degrees F) for the month.

At least seven other deaths in France, five from drowning, have also been tied to the sweltering conditions. May 26 was the hottest May weather in the country’s history, according to Météo-France, the French national weather service, with an average temperature of 24.9 degrees Celsius (76.8 degrees F). Two days later, daytime highs peaked at almost 40 degrees C (104 degrees F) in several regions.

“Such high temperatures have never been recorded in May since records began,” Météo-France said in a French-language statement.

The heat was bad enough to affect tennis’s French Open: top-ranked player Jannik Sinner was eliminated on Thursday after he took a medical time-out for cramping that was likely caused by dehydration.

The weather is being driven by a heat dome—a block of high pressure that traps hot air—hovering over Western Europe. But even with the heat dome factored in, temperatures have hit levels that are unusual at the peak of summer in several countries.

The heat seen since May 22 across much of France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Liechtenstein, Spain, Portugal, and the U.K. was likely made three to five times more likely because of the effects of climate change, according to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index.

Recent experience suggest more deaths are likely: unlike in the U.S., where an estimated 90 percent of households are equipped with air-conditioning, Europeans lag behind at only 20 percent, according to the International Energy Agency. That can make high temperatures particularly dangerous on the continent—in 2025, a series of heat waves led to some 24,400 deaths, 16,500 of which were attributed to climate change, while more than 62,700 people died of heat-related causes the year before.

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Pensions aren’t as common as they used to be in the private sector, as more companies have shifted away from traditional pension plans in the past few decades.

According to the latest government data, only 15% of private-sector workers had access to defined benefit plans. Most employees now rely on 401(k)s and other similar retirement savings options.

Sponsored by employers or unions, pension plans offer a fixed and dependable income stream during retirement for life. They are also less risky than a 401(k) plan, as the investments are managed and insured by your company. Finally, pension plans have specific tax advantages that might make them more attractive to some folks.

That being said, some states are more tax-friendly than others when it comes to your pension. Here’s what you need to know to make the most out of your retirement savings.

Is my pension taxable?

When it comes to taxes, pensions can be a bit tricky. Generally speaking, pension income is taxable at the federal level, so you need to consider this when planning your retirement budget. For more information, see How the IRS Taxes Retirement Income.

However, as Kiplinger reports, taxes in retirement vary from state to state. For instance, some states tax pension income fully, while others offer partial or complete exemptions.

As you consider where you’d like to retire, you should know how your pension and other retirement income will be taxed in your state of choice. That way, you can avoid unwelcome surprises when it’s time to file your tax return.

Some states don’t tax Social Security

All this talk of pensions might have you wondering about states that tax Social Security.

As of 2026, eight states tax Social Security benefits, with rules varying by age and income, similar to pensions. Some states offer tax benefits for individuals under a certain age, while others provide exemptions based on adjusted gross income (AGI).

Meanwhile, many states either don’t tax Social Security income or offer specific exemptions.

16 states that don’t tax your pension income 

Some states don’t tax your retirement income at all, but others might have certain exemptions on private or government pensions.

Here’s our list of the 16 states that will give you a tax break on some of your retirement income. (States are listed alphabetically.)  

 

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Oil prices, after falling last week, climbed on Monday as investors weighed a renewed exchange of military strikes between the United States and Iran against indications that both sides remain engaged in negotiations aimed at securing a lasting peace agreement.

Stocks were mixed, pulled higher in East Asia by the continued surge in interest in artificial intelligence, and lower in Europe.

The United States said it carried out a series of “self-defense” strikes in Iran over the weekend, the latest in a series of attacks in the past week. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced that it had struck a U.S. air base in retaliation for a U.S. attack on a communications facility.

Here is the latest:

• Oil pushes higher.
• Stocks are mixed.
• Gasoline prices slide.

Oil pushes higher.

• The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose nearly 3 percent to about $94 a barrel for August delivery, the most heavily traded contract.

• West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, jumped 3.5 percent to about $91 a barrel for July delivery, its most popular contract.

Stocks are mixed.

• Futures on the S&P 500 pointed to a 0.3 percent increase when stocks resume trading in the United States on Monday.

• Stocks in Asia, where countries import vast quantities of oil and gas, were mixed. South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI surged 4 percent higher, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose nearly 1 percent. Stocks in mainland China declined.

• In Europe, stocks were mixed. The Stoxx 600, a broad-index that tracks the region’s largest companies, was down slightly. Germany’s Dax index was up 0.5 percent.

Gasoline prices slide.

• Gas prices fell again on Monday, dropping to a national average of $4.32 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. Still, the overall increase in gasoline prices has raised the cost for drivers by 45 percent since the war began.

• Gas prices don’t move in lock step with crude, usually trailing increases or drops by a few days.

• The average price of diesel pulled back three cents to $5.45 on Sunday, up 45 percent since the start of the war.

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Iran’s Hard-Liners: A political fight is playing out in Iran, where the small but loud faction has used rallies, state media and private and public statements to try to undermine negotiations.

• Eid al-Adha: From Iran to Gaza, the celebrations that mark the sacred Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca were muted as war dragged on and shortages of food and fuel roiled the region.

• War Insurance: Many of the ships stranded in the Persian Gulf depend on coverage negotiated at Lloyd’s, the center of marine insurance for more than 300 years.

• Iran’s Internet Blackout: Iran began restoring internet access for tens of millions of Iranians, a senior official said, lifting a blackout imposed after the United States and Israel launched military strikes on the country.

• World Cup: The participation of Iran’s soccer team has been in doubt due to the war. With less than two weeks until the start of the tournament, Iran is continuing preparations at a training camp for three matches on the American West Coast.

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How High Are Gas Prices Where You Live?

Here is a county-level look at where drivers are facing the highest costs.

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Here’s one of the more unsettling schemes to recently emerge from Silicon Valley: human clones grown without a conscious brain. At least one biotech start-up reportedly has quixotic ambitions of breeding spare, unfeeling meat sacks as a way to clear the ethical path for procedures called “body transplants”—and, hypothetically, immortality. The idea seems to be that if these surrogate bodies are wholly unconscious, without even the faintest awareness of the world or themselves, then there’s no harm done.

It isn’t clear how much—or how little—of a brain these clones would have, but they’d certainly lack a cerebral cortex, the wrinkly outer layer that’s responsible for sophisticated cognitive functions such as language, self-reflection, and abstract thought. Most theorists have long assumed that the cortex is where consciousness, or our subjective experience of the world, arises. If they’re right, an organism without one would have no thoughts, sensations, or emotions—no inner life at all.

But what if they’re wrong? A growing number of consciousness researchers are seriously considering the possibility that consciousness could originate deep within the brain’s most evolutionarily ancient realm: the subcortex. They argue that, just as astronomy once labored under a false geocentric model, consciousness research is in thrall to the mistaken notion that cortical processing lies at the center of all experience—the corticocentric model. The idea is “as old as any attempt to relate brain to mind” in neuroscience, says Mark Solms, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “It’s a foundational theory about where the mind is.”

Yet over the past several decades, Solms and others have marshalled counterevidence in hopes of forcing a Copernican upheaval in their field. The subcortical revolution, should it come to pass, would have massive implications for how we define and measure consciousness—and for which creatures we deem worthy of moral consideration.

The Brain in Two Parts

The cortex is neuroanatomy’s latest innovation, and it has done well for itself. Its size varies across species, but in humans and many other mammals, the cortex now swells to epic proportions—around 75 percent of brain mass, in our case—and envelops the older structures beneath it. The inmost region, the subcortex, holds more foundational responsibilities than the upstart upstairs: maintaining arousal, processing emotions, regulating the body, and relaying sensory information.

The cortex and the subcortex are tightly interconnected. When most sensory information enters the brain, it flows through deep-brain relay points in the subcortex on its way up to the cortex, which then responds with feedback signals in an ongoing communication loop. Virtually all neuroscientists agree that, in healthy human brains, consciousness depends on this continuous dialogue between cortex and subcortex; it’s been clear for nearly a century that if certain parts of the subcortical brain stem get damaged, “the lights go out,” as Solms puts it. The question is whether the subcortex is merely a power supply keeping the cortex’s consciousness online, as corticalists hold, or whether it can sustain basic consciousness by itself.

Unconscious Zombies

The most intuitive evidence that the subcortex is more powerful than we thought is that many organisms without a cortex nevertheless seem conscious. We need not wait for Silicon Valley’s clones: children with a rare developmental disorder called hydranencephaly are already born sans cortex and, on that basis, are often classified as being in an unconscious vegetative state.

But in 2004, at what turned out to be a pivotal moment for how researchers think about the subcortex, Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker joined five families that included children with hydranencephaly at Disney World.

He spent a week observing the children’s behavior. They giggled, played with toys, and generally showed “responsiveness to their surroundings in the form of emotional or orienting reactions to environmental events,” as he later wrote. They struck Merker as utterly normal, if developmentally delayed. Though they couldn’t speak and thus couldn’t report on their internal state, he simply could not believe he was in the presence of philosophical zombies—hypothetical beings that act like normal humans but have no felt experience.

Solms, following Merker’s example, also spent time around children with hydranencephaly. “The evidence that they are not ‘zombies’ is exactly the same evidence that your dog and your cat are not zombies,” he says. “They’re reporting by their behavior that they’re feeling things.”

Of course, the appearance of consciousness and consciousness itself are not the same thing. Strictly speaking, we can’t determine whether an organism is conscious unless it can somehow narrate its experience, leaving us to speculate about babies, brain organoids, and nonhuman animals. (What this means for large language models, which can narrate their “experience,” is another question.) So we seem to be at an impasse: How can nonverbal life-forms possibly prove they aren’t mindless automatons?

When language isn’t an option, most researchers will use other information to infer consciousness. Matthias Michel, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is prepared to attribute consciousness to other mammals, which have a cortex, and to birds, which have a functional equivalent in the pallium—but not to fish or insects, which do not.

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Eastern Ukraine — 

There is a whirr, a flurry of dust, a pause as the grainy image recalibrates, and then a devastating blast.

Underground, dozens of miles away, veterans of the most brutal urban battles in Ukraine, of Avdiivka and Bakhmut, are commanders in a new kind of killing – one they cannot feel, smell, or see up close. An entire mission directing six blasts against three Russian frontline targets in eastern Ukraine will involve no Ukrainian troops on the ground; the battle instead directed from gamer chairs, observed from reconnaissance drones above, run over dedicated livestreams.

Ukraine, suffering for months from manpower crises and uncertain backing from the United States, has undergone a remarkable evolution. Large parts of its war effort are now unmanned, the robots, drones, and remotely piloted tanks giving it a sudden, albeit fragile, edge over a lumbering and strained Russian invader. In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the first capture of a Russian position purely by robots and drones and added that since January, unmanned machines had conducted 22,000 missions.

Survival is the mother of invention, under the orange glow of computer processor fans and subtle overhead lighting. The unit here has learned from Russian prisoners of war that their enemy calls these robots – each carrying a huge payload of explosive on a four-wheel chassis – “silent death.” They can only hear their approach when they are 10 meters away – well within their blast radius.

The first robot stumbles on aluminum debris, its wheels furiously trying to get traction and move around the obstacle. Eventually, it navigates around the crater in its path, and from the observation drone above, the white heat of a small mushroom cloud flares up – the thermal footprint of the first blast. A second follows. The opening salvo of the assault is intended to distract the Russians and permit four other robots to get behind enemy lines.

The calculations here are simple: over 164 assaults, the “NC13” unit of the Third Assault Brigade has calculated they would have needed 2,300 troops for the same effect as their robot attackers. They would expect to have lost half their unit – dead or wounded – in the attacks, meaning the unmanned, doddering bombs on the screen in front of them are a technological advance that has saved a thousand Ukrainians.

“I couldn’t even imagine such a thing, back then”, said Bar, the unit’s deputy commander, of his time in brutal urban combat in Donbas. “But I realize that if such equipment had been available at the time… more of my comrades would have survived.”

For Mykola “Makar” Zinkevych, the unit’s commander, the new world is lacking. “Back then, war was somehow more, shall we say, masculine. It was your skills that mattered there – how well you’d trained, how disciplined you were, and so on. Now, technology decides everything. There is no going back.” It is simply a case of who can adapt and evolve faster in the world of unmanned, remote killing.

New warfare, new heroes

The Ukrainian approach is born of a manpower crisis, where a smaller population has been ravaged by a devastating toll from four years of Russian invasion. But Kyiv’s early embrace of drones, and the mass-industrialization of their accuracy and power, has begun to exact a defining toll on Moscow.

Ukraine’s policy now is to kill or injure 35,000 Russians a month, something they have achieved this year, the goal being to force the Kremlin into uncomfortable and unpopular recruitment from the urban center and the middle classes. An estimate from the British spy agency GCHQ released Wednesday put the total Russian death toll at 500,000, citing new information.

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Technology is giving an advantage to Ukraine against a bigger enemy. CNN

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For nearly three decades, Raquel Molina — an immigrant from El Salvador who has a valid Social Security number and permission to work in the United States — swabbed the toilets, wiped down the seats, and vacuumed the aisles of airplanes at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

But last summer, Ms. Molina, 65, was abruptly fired from her $19.75-per-hour cleaning job, alongside dozens of other immigrants who have long legally worked at Logan. Her supervisor told her she no longer had clearance to enter secure areas at the airport. The Trump administration had decided that only U.S. citizens, green card holders, and others with more permanent forms of residency should be granted access, according to a lawsuit that a labor union filed in federal court.

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Ms. Molina, who has been living legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian program that shelters people from troubled countries until they can safely return home. “I had worked hard at my job. This news put me in a state of shock.”

Her firing reflected a broader and methodically planned piece of President Trump’s hard-line strategy to make the United States less welcoming to those from other countries.

For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits, and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.

The initiative underscores the president’s ability to reshape immigration policy through executive orders and the vast power of federal regulations while sidestepping Congress. And it shows how the administration has pursued more creative — and lower-profile — tactics after Mr. Trump’s militarized deportation raids into major cities prompted political backlash earlier this year.

The changes range from structural shifts in the immigration system to small-scale, regulatory tweaks taking away jobs or services from just a few thousand people like Ms. Molina. In her case, the administration no longer considered T.P.S. a form of “authorized residency,” said Justin Long, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, meaning Ms. Molina could not be “given official government credentials and granted unescorted access to secure airport areas.”

The administration’s strategy, along with the threat of arrest and imprisonment, has helped drive many immigrants underground, intimidating them from filing taxes, visiting doctors and even traveling. So far, more than 116,000 people without permanent legal status have voluntarily left the United States, including some through a government self-deportation program, according to internal Department of Homeland Security figures reviewed by The New York Times. Many others are believed to have departed without telling the government.

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A man and child exited the Annandale Immigration Court earlier this month in Annandale, Va. The Trump administration is pressuring immigrants to leave the country voluntarily by squeezing them financially. Credit…Salwan Georges for The New York Times

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