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Thousands of displaced families flooded the main highway to southern Lebanon on Friday, hours after a 10-day cease-fire pausing Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah went into effect.

The fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has threatened the fragile halt in fighting between Iran and the United States until next week. The Lebanon cease-fire removes a major hurdle to ending the U.S.-Iran war because the Iranian government has insisted that the truce extend to Lebanon.

When the war began, Abdullah Raouf Hamzieh, 54, had to leave his home near Bint Jbiel, a town in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah and Israeli forces have clashed in recent days. He recalled feeling ecstatic when the 2024 cease-fire was announced, and said it felt like it was a win for Hezbollah. But as Israeli forces continued to strike Lebanon in the year since, his enthusiasm faded.

“It actually wasn’t a victory; it was a disaster what happened,” Hamzieh said. Now, he hopes that the temporary truce will finally lead to a more lasting peace.

Many Lebanese, especially those displaced by the war, still feel uneasy and uncertain about the days to come. Unlike the cease-fire in 2024, which was indefinite, this one is for only 10 days.

“If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be; it would be devastating,” said Israa Jaber, 54, as she sat in her car waiting in traffic heading south to her home in the town of Srifa. Jaber’s 9-year-old daughter Lamis, said she missed her teddy bears and her makeup, which she left at home in their rush to flee last month.

In Qasmiyeh, a town on the highway that runs along Lebanon’s coast, Lebanese army soldiers are using excavators to repair a bridge that links the road from the north to the south. The crossing has become the main bottleneck as thousands of people try to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.

Over the past month and a half, Israeli forces bombarded all of the main bridges on the Litani River, which divides northern and southern Lebanon. They hit the bridge in Qasmiyeh again yesterday, hours before the ceasefire was announced.

There have been heavy Israeli airstrikes in Dahiya, the dense area on the southern edge of Beirut. Ahmad Lahham, a Dahiya resident, expressed defiance on Friday and criticized the Lebanese government for trying to end to the fighting.

“I am standing in front of my destroyed house, you think I care? I don’t,” said Lahham, 48. He added: “They want peace with the enemy, and we still have blood on our ground.”

Some in northern Israel criticized the truce after it was announced on Thursday, arguing that it would do little to remove the threat posed by Hezbollah. “This is what it is like to have a government that cares about America’s interest, and not that of its citizens,” David Azoulay, the head of the Israeli border village of Metula, wrote on social media.

The cease-fire has brought relief to many in northern Israel, which faced intense Hezbollah rocket fire in the current round of fighting. These rocket launches continued into the last hour before the cease-fire went into effect at midnight. At least eight people were injured in the city of Nahariya on Thursday, according to the national emergency service.

After the cease-fire went into effect at midnight, thousands of displaced families hoping to return to their homes flooded onto the main highway to southern Lebanon. But since Israeli forces destroyed the two bridges connecting the highway to the south over the Litani River, vehicles have to snake one by one along an ad-hoc dirt crossing. That bottleneck has created four lanes of stand-still traffic that stretches for more than two miles. “We will make it home. Even if we have to walk, we will go home today,” said Ali Roumieh, 41, as he sat in his car.

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Celebrations broke out in Lebanon after its government agreed to a 10-day cease-fire with Israel. In both Israel and Lebanon, some people remained wary that the truce would hold. Credit Credit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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It may be April, but for most of the country, summer feels very much like it’s already here. This week, East Coast states will see unusually hot days, with temperatures in some major cities reaching as high as the 90s Fahrenheit (mid-30s Celsius).

New York City could experience daytime highs in the mid-80s F (around 30 degrees C), according to the National Weather Service (NWS). In Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, it could hit the 90s F. Richmond, Va., is expected to reach 94 degrees F (34 degrees C) on Wednesday.

The scorching temperatures are driven by an area of high pressure across the eastern U.S., with wind flow from the South and not a lot of cloud cover, says Maryland-based NWS meteorologist Frank Pereira. A low chance of storms, which can help break the heat, is also not helping.

Wednesday is expected to be this week’s hottest day in much of the mid-Atlantic. The NWS has warned that parts of North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania will have a “moderate” risk of heat-related health effects such as heat stress, with pockets of “major” risk around Washington, D.C.

 

“This is impressive heat for mid-April, arriving weeks earlier than we typically see in many cities,” said Matt Benz, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, in a statement. “Early-season heat can hit harder than people expect because it arrives before routines, clothing, and outdoor plans have adjusted to summerlike conditions.”

In New York City, for instance, April temperatures in Central Park typically fall somewhere in the 40s and 50s F (single digits to mid-10s C), according to data collected by the NWS dating back to the late 1860s. The highest April temperature ever recorded in the park was 96 degrees F (36 degrees C) in 1976 and 2002.

This year has already seen several broken heat records. In March, at least eight states saw the highest temperatures for that month ever recorded. And nine western states experienced their hottest winters in 2025. More records could fall: forecasters are increasingly predicting that an El Niño will return this summer, and it may drive up global temperatures.

More immediately, for the eastern U.S., relief is on the horizon—a “pretty strong” cold front will likely move in this weekend, and the high temperatures will abate, Pereira says.

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65 million years ago, a meteor struck the Mexican Yucatan peninsula, throwing tons of dust in the air and contributing to mass extinctions. MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, Getty Images

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When China declared on Monday that the U.S. blockade of Iranian oil leaving the Strait of Hormuz was “dangerous and irresponsible,” it was a brief window into President Trump’s latest challenge: how to keep the Iran conflict from upending an emerging détente with China.

Mr. Trump is expected to land in Beijing in four weeks, in what was imagined as a carefully planned, highly orchestrated effort to recast the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.

The president has already delayed the trip once, and White House officials insist there is no discussion of putting it off again, even if the United States is still choking off Iranian oil exports. Ninety percent of those exports — more than 1.3 million barrels per day — were purchased by China before the American and Israeli attack began on Feb. 28.

At first, the Chinese were relatively quiet about the military action, knowing that the shipments already at sea and an impressive stockpile of emergency reserves of oil would likely tide them through. They ignored Mr. Trump’s demand that China send warships to keep the strait open. They produced standard-issue calls for both sides to stand down.

But once the blockade began on Monday, and facing the prospect that Chinese-flagged cargo ships, some manned by Chinese crews, could be turned away by the U.S. Navy, the tone shifted.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made his first public comments on the war on Tuesday, saying that the world could not risk reverting “to the law of the jungle.” He never mentioned the United States or Mr. Trump. But he did not need to, adding during a meeting with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi that “to maintain the authority of international rule of law, we cannot use it when it suits us and abandon it when it doesn’t.”

It was a clear reference to Mr. Trump, who in January told The New York Times that “I don’t need international law,” adding, “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He made it clear that he would be the arbiter of when international legal constraints applied to his actions.

China’s foreign ministry, playing its accustomed role in signaling between Washington and Beijing, took a tougher line, accusing the United States of a “targeted blockade” that “will only aggravate confrontation, escalate tension, under the already fragile cease-fire, and further jeopardize safe passage thorough the Strait of Hormuz.”

For his part, Mr. Trump has largely refrained from uttering much criticism, even when it became clear last week that U.S. intelligence agencies had obtained information that China might have sent a shipment of shoulder-fired missiles to the Iranians, for use in the conflict. The intelligence was not definitive, and there is no evidence that Chinese missiles have been used against U.S. or Israeli forces.

“I doubt they would do that,” Mr. Trump said. He quickly added that “if we catch them doing that, they get a 50 percent tariff,” employing his go-to threat against any country defying his will. But he has dropped the subject, perhaps recognizing that any threat of new tariffs could derail his hopes of announcing a trade deal, the lowest-hanging fruit in U.S.-China diplomacy.

“President Trump has created the circumstance where two of his biggest goals are in direct conflict,” said Kurt Campbell, a former deputy secretary of state under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the chairman of the Asia Group, which he founded.

“One is to monitor and control all cargo coming through the strait, which includes China’s,” he said. “And the other is his desire for a manifestly positive visit to Beijing.”

Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China, David Perdue, was in the Oval Office late on Tuesday, discussing the upcoming visit. National security officials said that before the Iran conflict broke out, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had negotiated the outlines of economic initiatives the two countries would announce.

Far less progress has been made on the major security issues, according to U.S. officials, including how to talk about the future of Taiwan, or China’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal, or its military buildup in the South China Sea and the confrontations it has sparked with the Philippines.

With a month to go before Mr. Trump lands in Beijing, it is still unclear how the two leaders will structure a conversation about the blockade — if it is still in force — or about the display of U.S. military power that began with the seizure of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, then proceeded with Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran.

But there is considerable evidence the Chinese military is intently focused on how the United States pulled off both attacks. Chinese officials appear concerned about the speed at which the Iranian leadership was decapitated in the opening hours of the war.

“There is a lot of speculation about what can break the U.S.-China détente, and undermine the summit,” said Rush Doshi, an assistant professor at Georgetown University and former adviser to Mr. Biden on China. “It hasn’t been issues like A.I. chips, or even rare earths,” he added, referring to two areas of intense competition between the two nations. “But it could be Iran.”

President Trump meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea last October. They will meet again next month. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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“Compleximers”—materials that can be molded like window glass but that resist impacts like plastic does—shouldn’t exist, researchers say. Nevertheless, a few grams of one such substance sit in a laboratory at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

In Nature Communications, Wageningen physical chemist Jasper van der Gucht and his team describe what makes compleximers as meltable as glass yet as hard to break as plastic. Someday, this paradoxical stuff could make it easier to fashion and fix sturdy protective gear such as helmets.

Window glass, called silica, and most plastics are “glassy” materials—when they cool from their liquid states, they don’t solidify into crystals with neatly arranged atoms like water does when it freezes into ice. Instead, they form an amorphous mass that feels like a solid but has randomly arranged atoms like a liquid.

For decades, scientists have thought, based on experimental observations, that the lower a glassy material’s melting rate, the less impact it can bear. Both slow-melting window glass and faster-melting plastic abide by this rule: the former changes state slowly but shatters easily, whereas the latter solidifies and melts abruptly but can better withstand impact. But van der Gucht and his team found that compleximers completely defy this law. The trick could lie in the material’s structure: its long chains of molecules, called polymers, are held together by a far-reaching kind of bond.

The researchers initially created compleximers, a term they coined, as an easily recyclable alternative to a type of plastic called thermoset. Thermosets are made up of polymer chains held tightly together by extremely hard-to-break chemical bonds, which makes them very stable but hard to recycle. The researchers added charged molecules, which made the chains cling to one another using an ionic, “opposites attract” type of bond instead, and they incorporated water-repelling compounds to stop the chains from disintegrating in water. The charged molecules’ ionic interactions—which hold over longer distances than the previous chemical bonds—may help compleximers stay compact rather than rapidly expanding to melt immediately when heated, the team suggests.

Ionic interactions could improve the mechanical properties of glass-forming materials and make them easier to work with, says University of Chicago chemical engineer Matthew Tirrell, who was not involved in the work.

The slow melting also means compleximer-based objects are easier to fix than ones made of thermosets; “just by heating it with a heat gun, you can repair a scratch or a crack,” van der Gucht says.

Both researchers say this rule-defying material could also give physicists a better understanding of how glass forms, a phenomenon called the glass transition. Finding these long-range interactions that make glassy materials melt differently, van der Gucht says, “should help theorists explain the glass transition in a more general sense.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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Key Takeaways

• Just like grape farming requires year-round preparation, building a successful company requires consistent effort, patience, and focusing on sustainable growth rather than quick wins.
• Just as crops need protection from disease, businesses must proactively guard against threats to keep operations running effectively.
• The most enduring companies focus on long-term value and steady development instead of chasing fast profits or short-lived success.

What comes to mind when you try to picture a future tech CEO? Do you picture a lone programmer working out of his humble garage in Palo Alto, bent over a motherboard with a screwdriver in a pair of Levi’s 501s? Or do you imagine some Ivy Leaguer building the next major social media platform in his dorm while his roommates are busy going to parties and trying out for the rowing team?

No matter what you’re thinking of, I’ll bet it’s not a teenage kid harvesting grapes in rural Washington State. But that’s exactly how my career started, and I’m glad it did.

Before I was the CEO of an industry-leading power dialer for outbound sales teams, I spent my days helping out on my parents’ concord grape farm: a 700-acre property located a few hours southeast of Seattle.

Pruning vines, managing canopy growth, and shearing clusters might not seem analogous to living in Silicon Valley or going to Harvard. But these experiences taught me some of the most memorable and valuable lessons of my life.

Now it’s time to harvest those lessons and bring them to you. Here’s what growing grapes in my youth taught me about how to grow a company.

A time to plant and a time to harvest

One lesson from my childhood that I come back to over and over again is that growth happens in cycles. It’s rarely consistent and linear. You have to plant seeds before you can reap the fruits of your labor.

Concord grapes are normally harvested at the end of the summer or early in the fall. It’s an immensely satisfying time of year. You can tell they’re ready to come off the vine because they turn a distinctive, dusky shade of purple that makes them stand out like precious stones in the early morning sunlight. Dawn is the best time to collect them, just after the morning dew dries.

But that means you spend the rest of your year working, and working hard. Grapes don’t grow by themselves. Winter is for pruning and cutting back dead wood so that your fruit-producing canes are free to grow. Spring is when you’ll maintain your trellises and monitor your grapes for weeds or signs of disease. And canopy management will eat up most of your summer as you remove excess leaves to increase the amount of sun and airflow your crops are getting.

That takes a huge amount of effort, especially when you’re doing it for 700 acres. But every phase is an essential part of producing the end product.

The same thing applies to PhoneBurner. Tech companies that are market leaders face immense pressure to innovate. But we can’t just deploy new features all the time if we want to grow the platform sustainably. For instance, we could have rushed into parallel dialing to help customers dial contacts faster. Instead, we focused on making our single-line power dialer faster and easier to use. It may not chase vanity metrics, but it helps teams have more real conversations while protecting their caller ID reputation.

Decisions like that were our way of tending the vineyard — being deliberate about where we invested our time so we could strengthen the parts of the platform our customers rely on most.

Protecting your crop as a lesson in risk management

Grapes and technology are both more vulnerable than you might think, and grapes aren’t the only thing that grew on my parents’ farm. If we weren’t careful, we also got black rot and mildew. Keeping our grapes safe meant constantly taking steps to prevent those threats and mitigate the damage they caused whenever they did manage to show up.

Outbound calling has its own version of crop disease. Phone numbers can get mislabeled as spam, blocked by carriers or filtered before they ever reach the person you’re trying to call. When that happens, it doesn’t matter how strong your team or message is — your calls simply stop getting through.

That’s why PhoneBurner released ARMOR® and was among the first to focus heavily on number reputation, answer rates and Responsible Communications™ practices. If your numbers aren’t healthy, your calls won’t reach people. And if your calls don’t reach people, nothing else in your outbound strategy has a chance to work.

Growth and sustainability

Finally, I want to push back against a narrative I hear about all too often in tech: that successful entrepreneurship looks like getting in on the ground floor of an idea when it’s profitable, making a lot of money quickly, and then getting out before it inevitably collapses. I have never believed in this kind of approach to business, and I never will.

None of the really successful people I’ve met in my lifetime have been flash-in-the-pan founders. The Forbes business empire is 108 years old. Steve Forbes, whose advice I once asked for at a book signing in my twenties, never staked his family’s legacy on a quick cash grab. The risks he took were calculated to help him continue his stewardship of what the generations before him had started.

I don’t work full-time on the family farm anymore, although I try to help out whenever I’m back in the area. But working there years ago helped me understand the value of building things that last, and that’s the attitude I’ve applied to all of my business ventures — from PhoneBurner to the DRIVE (Data Reporting Information and Visualization Exchange) Conference at the University of Washington, which I founded in 2011 and which is still going strong today.

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A future tech CEO

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Young Republicans are also far less likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s decision to take military action than are Republicans older than 45.

This is the first time Ipsos has asked the costs-and-benefits question. But the survey also included a question that has been repeated since the war started, and found that just 35 percent of Americans approved of the military strikes in Iran. That number has remained stable among all Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, over the last month.

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Global Economic Warning: War in the Middle East has upended the world economy, the International Monetary Fund said, warning in a report that disruptions to oil markets could slow growth, fuel inflation and raise the possibility of a global recession.

• Strait of Hormuz: Shipowners and shipping experts said they did not expect a large number of vessels to return quickly to the strait because of concerns that the United States’ blockade plan lacked detail on how commercial vessels would be protected if they decided to go through the waterway.

• Iran’s Internet Blackout: As the country’s near-total internet blackout extends into its seventh week, Iranian businesses and academics are arguing that the shutdown not only violates citizens’ rights but further destabilizes the country’s already weakened economy.

• Israelis on the War: The ongoing war has left many in Israel despairing over how little they believe the fighting accomplished compared with the objectives laid out by their leaders.

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Michael Ciaglo for The New York Times

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A 63-year-old man has been functionally cured of HIV with a bone marrow transplant. While bone marrow donations have resulted in HIV remission in the past, this is the first time that has occurred with a donation from the recipient’s sibling.

The man received a bone marrow donation from his brother, who has a rare genetic mutation called CCR5Δ32 that confers resistance to HIV-1, the most common type of human immunodeficiency virus. When a person has two copies of this genetic mutation, the CCR5 surface protein, to which HIV commonly binds, is prevented from being expressed on human immune cells called T cells. A paper published today in Nature Microbiology showed how, after the transplant, the donor cells had replaced the HIV-positive man’s bone marrow cells and their genes had two copies of a CCR5Δ32 mutation (not all cells in the recipient’s body got replaced, however). His healthy T cell count soared in the year after the procedure and stayed at healthy levels after he stopped antiretroviral therapy (ART)—the gold standard treatment for HIV—two years later.

ART drugs can prevent HIV from reproducing in the body and spreading to other people. But they don’t eliminate the virus entirely—it sticks around in dormant reservoirs around the body. If a person with HIV stops taking ART, the virus begins spreading again.

In the new study, the researchers tested the recipient’s blood, gut tissues, and bone marrow to search for reservoirs of HIV after the bone marrow transplant. They found no detectable HIV in the places it would normally linger in someone who was on ART.

“If this reaction does not happen in all or at least most of the immunological tissues, there might be a risk for rebound at some point,” says Marius Trøseid, an infectious disease specialist at Oslo University Hospital and a co-author of the paper. “I think we have shown, for the first time, that it’s a complete engraftment—both in peripheral blood, which has been shown in several other cases, in bone marrow, which has also been shown in a couple of other cases, and then also the gut mucosal tissue, which we think is key for [a] cure.”

But this treatment isn’t yet available for most people with HIV. Patients in New York City, London, Düsseldorf, and other places who achieved HIV remission after a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a CCR5Δ32 mutation each needed it for another reason, such as cancer treatment.

“This is really only for a patient with additional malignancies or medical conditions that require a transplant because [by] itself, it’s just too risky” compared with ongoing ART treatment, says Jingmei Hsu, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and lead author of the study on a patient in New York City, who was not part of the new paper.

For recipients, bone marrow transplants present significant risks, including severe infections, graft versus host disease (GVHD), in which donor cells attack the patient’s body, or even death. So “the risk of transplant needs to be substantially lower than the risk of the patient dying from their malignancy,” Trøseid says.

Through various studies that have measured the effect of a bone marrow transplant on a person’s HIV status, scientists have seen the infection go into remission even when the donor does not have two copies of the CCR5Δ32 mutation. Because the new study used donor cells from the patient’s sibling, it adds novel information about how these transplants work.

If the cells are too different from those of the donor, transplant complications such as GVHD could be more of a concern, says Björn-Erik Ole Jensen, head of the infectious disease department at the University Hospital of Dusseldorf, who was not involved in this study. If the donor cells are too similar to those of the recipient, however, there’s a risk that the treatment could fail to effectively destroy infected T cells.

“[A sibling transplant] may be a difference, but we don’t understand everything perfectly,” Jensen says. “This is why all these cases are still interesting.”

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Open since 2016 on the NRG Solar Terrace atop the SAP Tower, the organic farm typically grows nearly 40 crops, including broccoli, squash, eggplant, peppers, artichoke, strawberries, garlic, and herbs. Harvested ingredients show up in the stadium via the hors d’oeuvres passed out in suites, the fresh market salads served in premium clubs, and as special menu items sold at select concessions vendor stands. Crops are replanted annually after each harvest, with one to two planting cycles per season, depending on growth. Anything left over is donated to local food banks and nonprofits.

Open since 2016 on the NRG Solar Terrace atop the SAP Tower, the organic farm typically grows nearly 40 crops, including broccoli, squash, eggplant, peppers, artichoke, strawberries, garlic, and herbs. Harvested ingredients show up in the stadium via the hors d’oeuvres passed out in suites, the fresh market salads served in premium clubs, and as special menu items sold at select concessions vendor stands. Crops are replanted annually after each harvest, with one to two planting cycles per season, depending on growth. Anything left over is donated to local food banks and nonprofits.

“Faithful Farm is the largest on-site farm at a stadium in North America at 7,500 square feet, and it’s not just for show,” Jon Severson, the regional executive chef for Levy, the hospitality team at Levi’s Stadium, tells Food & Wine. “Each year, we plan menus across the stadium around the crop harvest calendar, and we work proactively with our farm partner, Farmscape, to cultivate in-season produce that is ripe at just the right time to bring peak freshness to game day.”

Inside Levi’s, fans have access to more than 100 food and beverage concessions, which include food stands, bars, and beer carts. On Super Bowl Sunday, two dishes will be sourced directly from the farm: the Gilroy Garlic Steak Frites sold near sections 109 and 315 and in the East Field Club, and the Rooftop Bulgogi Vegan Cheesesteak, available in the Bud Light Club.

“We’re using collard greens in our Rooftop Bulgogi Vegan Cheesesteak. It brings a crisp, slightly bitter freshness to cut the rich and creamy sriracha,” says Severson. “We’re also roasting hanger steak for our Gilroy Garlic Steak Frites with rosemary from our rooftop for a nice, herb-forward c

rust. It’s hyper-local sourcing on a massive scale, unlike anywhere else.”

Fans likely won’t see the farm when attending Sunday’s game — it’s only available for certain ticket holders to visit during the regular season — but attendees seeking something more elevated to eat than nachos or hot dogs (though rest assured, they’re still there, too) may taste its impact with locally grown flavors that are raising the bar on stadium fare. 

Severson adds, “It’s the ultimate tool that our chefs use to put an extra culinary touch on all that fans can enjoy at the stadium.”

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Credit: Courtesy of 49ers.com

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