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
Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.
It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel, and anti-American views.
But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss, he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
He has not been seen publicly since then, and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.
To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States, and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.
How Mr. Ahmadinejad was recruited to take part remains unknown.
The existence of the effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government. It underscores how Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went into the war not only misjudging how quickly they could achieve their objectives but also gambling to some degree on a risky plan for leadership change in Iran that even some of Mr. Trump’s aides found implausible. Some American officials were skeptical in particular about the viability of putting Mr. Ahmadinejad back into power.
“From the outset, President Trump was clear about his goals for Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and weaken their proxy,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in response to a request for comment about the regime change plan and Ahmadinejad. “The United States military met or exceeded all of its objectives, and now, our negotiators are working to make a deal that would end Iran’s nuclear capabilities for good.”
A spokesperson for Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, declined to comment.
U.S. officials spoke during the early days of the war about plans developed with Israel to identify a pragmatist who could take over the country. Officials insisted that there was intelligence that some within the Iranian regime would be willing to work with the United States, even if those people couldn’t be described as “moderates.”
Mr. Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by U.S. forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Mr. Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.
In recent years, Mr. Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have swirled about his loyalties. He was disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his aides were arrested, and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s movements were increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak section of eastern Tehran.
That American and Israeli officials saw Mr. Ahmadinejad as a potential leader of a new government in Iran is further evidence that the war in February was launched with the hopes of installing more pliable leadership in Tehran. Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet have said that the goals of the war were narrowly focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear, missile, and military capabilities.
There are many unanswered questions about how Israel and the United States planned to put Mr. Ahmadinejad in power, and the circumstances surrounding the airstrike that injured him. American officials said that the strike — carried out by the Israeli Air Force — was meant to kill the guards watching over Mr. Ahmadinejad as part of a plan to release him from house arrest.
On the first day of the war, Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The strike at Ayatollah Khamenei’s compound in central Tehran also blew up a meeting of Iranian officials, killing some officials whom the White House had identified as more willing to negotiate over a change in government than their bosses.
There were also initial reports at the time in the Iranian media that Mr. Ahmadinejad had been killed in the strike on his home.
The strike did not significantly damage Mr. Ahmadinejad’s house at the end of a dead-end street. But the security outpost at the entrance to the street was struck. Satellite imagery shows that building was destroyed.
In the days that followed, official news agencies clarified that he had survived but that his “bodyguards” — in actuality, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members who were both guarding him and holding him under house arrest — were killed.
An article in The Atlantic in March, citing anonymous associates of Mr. Ahmadinejad, said that the former president had been freed from government confinement after the strike at his house, which the article described as “in effect a jailbreak operation.”
After that article, an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad confirmed to The New York Times that Mr. Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage “Iran’s political, social, and military situation.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad would have been able to “play a very important role” in Iran in the near future, the associate said, suggesting that the United States saw him as similar to Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in Venezuela after American forces seized Mr. Maduro and has since worked closely with the Trump administration, the person said.
During his presidency, Mr. Ahmadinejad was known both for his hard-line policies and his often outlandish fundamentalist pronouncements, such as his declaration that there was not a single gay person in Iran and his denial of the Holocaust. He spoke at a conference in Tehran called “A World Without Zionism.”
Western satirists lampooned these views, and Mr. Ahmadinejad became something of an unwitting pop culture curiosity, even the subject of Saturday Night Live parodies.
He also presided over the country at a time when Iran was accelerating the enrichment of uranium it could one day use for making a nuclear bomb should it choose to weaponize its program. An American intelligence assessment in 2007 concluded that Iran had, years earlier, frozen its work on building a nuclear device but was continuing the enrichment of nuclear fuel it could use for a nuclear weapon if it changed its mind.
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Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran registering as a candidate in the presidential election in Tehran in 2024. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
In 2024, which is the most recent year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have released data for, Black women faced a maternal mortality rate of 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. That means they were more than three times as likely to die during childbirth than white women were.
But the Black maternal mortality crisis is just one part of a much larger problem. Black women also face disproportionately high rates of fibroids throughout their lives. They’re also more likely to have endometriosis go undiagnosed and more likely to die from endometrial cancer.
Today’s guest calls this the Black womb crisis. Dr. Kemi Doll is a professor in the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the director of the university’s Gynecologic Research and Cancer Equity Center. Her new book, A Terrible Strength, combines research data and personal stories to offer insight into this crisis and a way forward.
Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Kemi Doll: Thank you for having me.
Feltman: I think some of our listeners are, are probably familiar with the
Black maternal mortality crisis, but your book broadens its scope to what you call the Black womb crisis. Can you tell me more about what that phrase encompasses and why that distinction is important?
Doll: Yes, I use that phrase very intentionally to encompass the entire what I think of as, like, the gynecologic life course, so, like, the womb from the time that you start your period and through and past the time that people go through menopause, because, as we know, we spend most of our lives not pregnant. And there are severe gynecologic conditions, up to and including cancer, that disproportionately affect Black women. And what I have found is that when I use the language of the womb, it kind of brings everybody into what we’re talking about and allows us to expand our imagination past just the maternal mortality crisis, to recognizing that the womb itself is actually—we’re having a lot of suffering, you know, from many diseases across the life course.
Feltman: Mm. So tell me a little bit about what brought you to writing this book.
Doll: I am a clinically trained gynecologic oncologist, and I’m also a health-equity scientist, and so my research really focused on the question of why Black women had such a higher mortality rate after endometrial cancer diagnosis in this country. And I like to say that I was agnostic to method; I’m very focused on the problem, and I’ll use any method to get to a solution. And one of the things that we found early on is that endometrial cancer, for a lot of Black women, is just the end of a lifetime of suffering from fibroids and endometriosis and heavy bleeding and that even though, from a medical and biological standpoint, we think of cancer as this other entity and we’re kind of over in a different category, for the actual Black woman going through the disease, she thinks of it as yet another womb condition she’s dealing with.
And so what brought me to write the book was recognizing that we’re not going to bridge the gap of understanding about endometrial cancer, and we’re certainly not going to start to intervene on the issues with delayed diagnosis and incomplete treatment, and the things that plague Black women unless we speak to the experience Black women have over their entire lives with their womb. And so this book is really serving to create a new narrative where we unite those perspectives, and frankly, that we show Black women that from—physicians and scientists can also speak to them in a holistic manner that takes into account all of their life experiences with regard to their womb.
Feltman: Can you tell me more about what we might miss when we just focus on the data in trying to solve problems like this?
Doll: Sure, so a great example is how we diagnose endometrial cancer. So when I was in training and coming up, I learned that the way that we diagnose endometrial cancer is that when a woman has postmenopausal bleeding, she comes to the doctor, we do an ultrasound to evaluate the thickness of what we call the endometrial lining, or the endometrial echo, and if that is over a certain threshold, then her risk is higher and we do a biopsy to rule in or rule out endometrial cancer.
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Harmony; Scientific American Illustrations
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Through the muffle of both an interior door and an exterior one, I hear a chair scraping against pavers. Instantly, adrenaline courses through my body. I can hear the whoosh of my blood pumping in my ears, can feel a flat and unyielding pressure against my sternum and throat.
My eyes fly open, and I imagine the hairs on my arms and legs similarly standing at attention, but I have trained myself to stay perfectly still when this bodily response occurs, though every instinct I have is calling me to my feet. In slow motion, as if she will hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets, I shift my gaze downward to my baby. Her breath is light and warm against my chest. I have been holding her for over an hour, trying repeatedly to lull her with milk into a deep enough sleep that I can carefully — so, so carefully — rise from the reclining chair and take the six steps across the room to her crib, where I will attempt for the fourth time in an hour to place her like a piece of unexploded ordnance, not daring to breathe during the operation.
From the patio, I hear the noise again, and I recognize it immediately: the legs of our wooden outdoor furniture are dragging as N gets in and out of a chair. From my place in the noise-controlled, blackout-curtained nursery, where I am one sneeze or hiccup away from having to start the entire process over from scratch, the scraping sounds like a muffler dragging on the highway. My skin is hot with rage, which is just a cover for the deep despair that swells my whole body. My baby won’t sleep unless I am holding her. I am many, many months past the breaking point of going without sleep, and without respite, without my body being under my own control. Under these circumstances, anything that threatens to wake the baby up feels like a direct “f*ck you” to me and my labor, and I know he is out there, my boyfriend, love of my life, inadvertently scraping the f*cking chair on the patio while I die of exhaustion and boredom in here.
The anger and powerlessness snake up my throat from my belly. The baby stirs — whether from the sound of the chair or from my sudden energetic shift, I don’t know — and I know this means I will have to reset my inner countdown at least another 30 minutes. Tears spill down my cheeks, hot and fast, splashing down onto the baby’s face, at the same pace that the rage crests inside my body and rises, like vomit, through my gullet. It wants out. It wants to scream. But I am the parent, not the baby, so I clamp my hand over my lips and try to let it noiselessly into the chamber of my mouth.
I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.
“Rage is an unmet need,” a friend often reminds me when we talk about our experiences — shared, but different — of postpartum rage. She’s a provider of mental-health services to perinatal people and the operator of the Mom Rage Art Studio, so I take her words seriously. They feel right. This language came up in all my conversations about postpartum anger. I wish I’d had their clarity.
For me, it was the noise. For other new parents, it might be something completely different, like perceived or real incompetence at taking care of the baby. For others, it is beard hairs in the sink or a chronically overfull trash can or the way he pronounces the word corduroy. Sometimes it’s the way she just gets up and leaves the house when she needs something. Or, most damning of all, simply his face, existing. Postpartum rage triggers are as diverse as they are affecting, but remain remarkably consistent in their targets: the near and the dear.
When I had my baby in 2020, I was well armed for the fight against postpartum depression. PPD is a predator you can see coming — it’s even got its own acronym! — so I assembled my defenses accordingly: therapist, postpartum group, partner, family, Expecting Better, some mindfulness sh*t I bookmarked on YouTube. I took a dutiful series of classes and handouts with the precise vibe of a D.A.R.E. class that taught me the things to watch out for. Sleeping too much, crying too much (how much is too much? No one can say), “persistent sadness,” and thoughts of self-harm. In other words, a version of the treatment-resistant major depression I have managed for most of my life, except now there’s a baby. I was on Prozac by the time Prozac Nation came out. I can clock a generic versus name-brand Zoloft, Paxil, and Lexapro on sight. I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.
Befitting his home in the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. practices the politics of narcissism: If I embrace it, it must be right. If I embody it, you should emulate it.
I flaunt a sun-sizzled appearance, so you should have the same leathery license.
About two months ago, the health secretary nixed a proposal by the Food and Drug Administration to make tanning beds, like alcohol and cigarettes, off-limits to minors. That development didn’t get extensive news media attention. It couldn’t compete with all the salvos being exchanged — between the United States and Iran, between President Trump and the pope — and it arguably had marginal significance: The proposal had been on the books, unimplemented, for more than a decade. Kennedy wasn’t changing a policy. He was killing a possibility.
But why this one? Why bother? Is there some melanoma lobby we don’t know about? Needn’t he conserve his energy for his shirtless workouts and his mindless conspiracy theories?
He cited the importance of personal choice and the burden that tanning regulations would place on small businesses, but I think his attention to the matter reflected a particular obsession among Trump and his attendants. They’re fixated on looks — to a degree that’s not remotely normal, in a manner that’s positively cartoonish, with no appreciation for how much of themselves and their vacuous governing philosophy they’re revealing.
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised.
Appearances simultaneously obscure reality and substitute for it. Your sheen is your success, and you are what you impersonate. Trump has long been known to judge potential cabinet secretaries and military leaders on whether they look the part, and that thinking factored into his embrace of Kevin Warsh, who was just confirmed by the Senate to be the new chair of the Federal Reserve.
Sure, Warsh has an impressive résumé, and he has signaled obeisance to a president who demands such submission. But he has an additional asset. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’” Trump wrote in the late January social media post that announced Warsh’s selection. According to an article by Eva Roytburg in Fortune magazine at that time, Trump once told Warsh, during a 2019 meeting in the White House, “You’re a really handsome guy.”
To Trump, that’s an important credential. All the world’s a television show, “central casting” is a recurring compliment and handsomeness or beauty establishes a kind of superiority, which in turn bequeaths confidence, which then begets dominance. By his zoology, an aviary of peacocks equals a menagerie of lions.
And what peacocks these putzes are. In many other milieus, Kristi Noem’s comically voluminous tresses, suspiciously plump visage, and unsubtle makeup would be a waste of aggressive cosmetology. In Trump’s circle, they established her as a fierce warrior goddess — Wonder Woman minus the golden lasso — and got her the title of homeland security secretary for 13 sadistic months.
In many other milieus, Pete Hegseth’s habit of sharing videos of his workouts would be seen as a grossly self-enamored distraction. In Trump’s circle, they’re a testament to his tenacity. The defense secretary posted one such ode to his own musculature shortly before the beginning of the war with Iran, as U.S. warships headed toward that region; it showed him doing a bench press as the soldiers whom he’d gathered around him cheered, his wife applauded, and, I guess, the ayatollahs quivered. Nothing spells imminent doom like a cabinet member’s pecs.
Kennedy has painstakingly sculpted and burnished his own physique — through gym workouts, testosterone therapy, tanning. He has the same retrograde take on masculinity and male primping that Hegseth does, along with the same moth-to-flame fascination with social media, where he can be found pumping iron in jeans, ditching his shirt, soaking in a hot tub. Kid Rock joined him for cardio and calisthenics in a sauna. Hegseth joined him for — and beat him in — a race to finish 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups.
Is this supposed to pass for inspiration? It’s merely proof of perspiration. But it seems to raise rather than lower these exhibitionists’ standing with the president. Trump treats physical vanity as a secret handshake, a sign that you get his egotistic ethos and you belong. If you’re not strutting, you’re not selling.
Pitch and packaging are everything. Perfect them, and you don’t have to worry about the product itself. That thinking informs the cabinet secretaries’ physical preening just as it explains the president’s oratorical preening — all those ludicrous superlatives — and his emphasis on costumes, scenery, and slogans.
Remember those colorful charts in front of that gigantic American flag in the White House Rose Garden for the announcement of mathematically nonsensical tariffs that would come and go, increase and decrease, and ultimately be deemed illegal? Liberation Day was the semantic lipstick on that pig.
The war with Iran is Operation Epic Fury, and it has demonstrated anew that the Trump administration’s initiatives are lavishly marketed rather than carefully conceived. Assessments of the war’s progress change daily, even hourly, and repeatedly turn out to be unreliable, because they’re often just phrases put through the language equivalent of tanning beds to be given a glow and bronzed just so. That’s what’s important. Not the cancer growing beneath.
When “marine snow” made of dead plankton’s shells, fish poop, dust particles, and other debris descends to the ocean floor, it carries atmospheric carbon the plankton used to make their calcite shells. It’s one of the ways the ocean stores carbon, helping to keep greenhouse gases from turning the planet into an oversize toaster oven. Yet scientists realized that something has been dissolving those calcite shells and releasing carbon dioxide, reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA identified the culprit: dense microbe “cities” living inside the marine snow.
The individual cities are microscopic, but collectively they have powerful effects on Earth’s climate because the ocean is home to an inconceivable number of microbes. A shot glass full of seawater can contain millions of bacterial cells. “If you were to take every bacterial cell in the ocean and string them end to end like a chain of pearls, it would stretch 50 times around the Milky Way,” says study co-author Andrew Babbin, an oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To study the microbial cities, “we brought the ocean into the laboratory,” says Benedict Borer, lead study author and a biogeochemist at Rutgers University. The scientists introduced microbes to a microfluidic chip designed to mimic marine-snow particles and added fluorescent molecules whose glow changed with oxygen levels and acidity. (The system was so sensitive that at first, people breathing in the lab were affecting measurements.)
The researchers found that the cities’ chemical microenvironments increase calcite dissolution. Many oxygen-breathing microbes feed on carbon, then release carbon dioxide, which turns into carbonic acid in seawater. The sheer number of microbes breathing in such tight quarters creates concentrated pockets of carbonic acid in and around the marine-snow particles, which dissolve the snow’s calcite.
As marine-snow particles dissolve and get lighter, they also sink more slowly, the researchers say, giving carbon extra time to escape before it can reach long-term storage in the deep ocean and potentially increasing its release back into the environment. More research is needed to calculate microbial cities’ full influence on ocean acidity because dissolved calcite can counteract the carbonic acid to an extent.
“Large-scale biogeochemical processes often depend on very small-scale interactions,” says Hongjie Wang, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Babbin agrees: “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet.”
Once the last stars have walked the red (or green) carpet, the livestream has ended, and most of the cameras have stopped snapping at the Met Gala 2026, the real fun begins. This year, guests explored the museum’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, where the spring exhibition, “Costume Art,” was held; sat for a garden-inspired dinner at the Temple of Dendur; and took in musical performances by Sabrina Carpenter and Stevie Knicks.
And aside from the rare, forbidden bathroom selfie, photos from inside the event are hard to come by. Luckily, Vogue had photographer Francesc Planes on the scene, capturing all the candid moments you won’t see anywhere else. The Paris-based photographer, who has shot many a fashion week and whose work spans documentary and fashion photography, turned his lens toward attendees as they enjoyed the evening.
Below, see Planes’s point of view on the night through film photos.
Photographed by Francesc Planes 1/28
Beyoncé
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Click the link below the following photo for the complete collection of Planes Photos
In 1950, Robert Doisneau photographed a kiss you’ve surely seen. The man and woman seem to have been stopped by ardor amid the midday rush, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Though staged, it became, nearly immediately, one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
Surely unknown to Mr. Doisneau, nine years earlier, there was another kiss captured on film in Paris that was much more spontaneous, just as passionate — far more desperate — between two Jews about to be separated by Vichy police. This kiss, found on a contact sheet of Nazi propaganda images in a Reims flea market six years ago, is now at the heart of a new exhibition of 98 Nazi propaganda photos at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, curated by Lior Lalieu and me. This kiss, perhaps destined to become just as iconic, reveals a very different midcentury Parisian moment.
The photos provide a detailed visual account — almost minute by minute — of the very first, and little-known, roundup of Jews in France on May 14, 1941. That day, some 3,700 foreign-born Jews obeyed a summons by Paris police with a notice, printed on light green paper (it became known as the “green ticket roundup”), for what they believed would merely be a check of their immigration and identity papers. The operation was organized by a man named Theodor Dannecker, the envoy of Adolf Eichmann in Paris. A photographer with the Nazi propaganda unit in the city was on hand to observe.
What gives these newly discovered photographs their singular power is not only what they show but the fact that they survived at all. They remind us that the past is never entirely buried, and that images can unexpectedly return to challenge the void of memory and representation. They function today not as propaganda, the purpose for which they were originally produced, but as fragments of truth — painful, incomplete, and indispensable — that allow us to better understand the way the roundup was organized and conducted and also to get a glimpse of the victims’ shock, fear, and pain.
There are only a few hundred photographs of roundups or murders of Jews from the 1930s and 1940s, a disparity of mass proportion considering the extent of the genocide. Some were taken by victims as acts of resistance, some by bystanders, and others, like this collection, were by an authorized photographer for the Nazi propaganda machine. From time to time, grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators find these images in attics and boxes when the older generation passes away.
This particular group of photographs was meant to document a Nazi success story. They begin with the trap: Jewish men and their spouses were summoned to over 60 locations in Paris: police offices, various administrations, and a sports facility in the 11th Arrondissement. Women, we know from eyewitness testimony, were asked to return home to gather items; a list was provided. When they returned, as the images we now have on hand show, they were barred from reuniting with their male relatives. The doors were closed and guarded by French policemen. We can see the women’s pain, their bewilderment, many with bundles in their arms. We see couples as they part from each other.
Credit…via Mémorial de la Shoah.
Other photos document the departure of guarded buses, commandeered from the Paris bus company, filled with the captured men. We see the arrival of the internees at Paris’s Austerlitz train station. The same photographer captures the imprisonment of these Jews a few days later at the French internment camps, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Some 700 of those Jewish men were later liberated, or escaped, after the green ticket roundup. About 3,000 of those taken that day were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; of that group, just a scant few returned.
Taken months before the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe was made, these 98 photos do not show extermination camps, gas chambers, shootings, or even starvation. What they do show is the careful, methodical beginnings of racially motivated separation that later enabled the mass murder. The noted historian Raul Hilberg called this phase of the Nazi genocide “concentration.” There is no sign of outright violence; indeed, the despair of the ensnared Jews and their bewildered spouses is shown with a strange sensitivity by the German photographer.
At first, the photos were kept on file by the German Propaganda Unit in Paris. After the war, six of the 98 photos were found in the archives of the N.I.O.D. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, an indication that they were shared among the various propaganda units across Western Europe. A few others circulated among archives. But the vast majority were languishing, unseen, on contact sheets, until 2020, when two amateur collectors came upon them at a flea market. They brought the sheets to Ms. Lalieu, the director of photo collections at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, who analyzed the images in an effort to identify as many people as possible. Ms. Lalieu also identified the photographer as Harry Croner, a man from Berlin, who had gone on to have a stellar career in postwar West Berlin, as a famous cinema and opera photographer. ((Half Jewish himself, he spent the end of the war in a labor camp.)
A start-up’s plan to run drug experiments and even develop pharmaceuticals in orbit is taking shape. If it works, it could mark a step toward developing new medicines and, ultimately, a burgeoning space-based manufacturing industry.
The start-up in question is Varda Space Industries. This week, Varda announced a partnership with United Therapeutics, a biotech company that is known for its treatments targeting rare respiratory diseases and for organ transplants.
For the past few years, the Los Angeles County–based Varda has been sending capsules into space to develop its technology for performing automated experiments that it says can only be done in microgravity. These include the manipulation of certain kinds of small molecules—the backbone of many different types of medicines, from antibiotics to corticosteroids. “Surprisingly, it’s very economical for things like small molecules, where you’re able to create novel crystal seeds in space, and then bring them back down to Earth,” says Michael Reilly, Varda’s chief strategy officer.
United Therapeutics will primarily test its small molecule drugs with Varda’s in-orbit technologies, Reilly says. But he believes that applications will expand beyond United Therapeutics’ drugs to a range of biotechnologies, such as monoclonal antibodies, which, he believes, could eventually transform from primarily intravenously administered treatments to subcutaneous shots.
Varda’s goal is to provide an in-orbit environment to develop crystals for drugs under conditions that can never be achieved on Earth. “In space, you can get bigger crystals, more perfect crystals, and they can be more uniform,” says Anne Wilson, a Butler University chemist, who has designed experiments for the International Space Station (ISS) and collaborated with Redwire Space, a space infrastructure company. Crystals with unique physical structures can also be spawned in orbit, she says. Because of such advantages, one could fashion crystals with particularly valuable properties—for example, to make a drug become more soluble and require fewer doses, thereby reducing costs, Wilson says.
The potential is there, but it is currently a risky business, says Gerard Capellades, a chemical engineer at Rowan University, who has also worked with Redwire. For one, there’s the challenge of scale, he says: researchers will have to try to use the crystals grown in space as seeds that they can multiply on the ground or will need to focus on growing single, high-value crystals for applications outside the pharmaceutical sector. It’s also exceedingly difficult to control the experimental environment in such a way that guarantees the precise crystal structure needed in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Capellades describes the approach as a game of chance: “For the same environment, sometimes it can take minutes to form a crystal, and sometimes it can take weeks or longer,” he says. But he thinks that costs will eventually drop and that it’s worth pursuing.
Varda’s orbital lab, nicknamed “Winnebago,” consists of a 300-kilogram (about 660-pound) satellite bus. After being deposited in orbit by a launch vehicle, Winnebago uses its own propulsion to maneuver into the right attitude. The satellite houses the capsule in which the experiments are done. Once the work is complete, the capsule reenters the atmosphere at some 18,000 miles per hour, parachuting down with a bump in the Australian outback. (An early prototype’s return to Earth, with planned landing zone in a desert in Utah, was delayed in 2024 because the company was initially denied a reentry license by the Federal Aviation Administration.)
In addition to drug experiments, Varda also brings various defense experiment payloads on its spaceflights for the Pentagon to help defray the cost, Reilly says. While launch costs per pound of cargo have dropped over the past decade, thanks especially to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, they’re still not cheap. So Varda and other space companies keep looking for new customers.
Still, the drug industry may be one of the most enthusiastic about making the space economy work for it. “First, it’s a giant market,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher, who studies the private space sector. “It’s also because the mass of some of the key ingredients in pharmaceuticals is relatively small.” For years, academic and commercial researchers have sent experiments to both the ISS and China’s space station, Tiangong. But according to Reilly, Varda and SpaceX are currently the only companies capable of launching experiments into orbit that don’t need to be operated by astronauts.
New opportunities could also emerge in the coming commercial space station era, planned for the 2030s, when new orbital outposts launch to replace the aging ISS. For example, the companies Space Tango and Voyager Technologies (formerly Nanoracks) have already begun providing plug-and-play research support services in space, and Voyager Technologies is working on a commercial station concept, called Starlab. That proposal and others have the pharma industry at their center, Weinzierl says. Meanwhile, Varda is planning for more partnerships and a faster launch cadence, eventually moving from a launch per quarter to every other month.
Weinzierl hopes that Varda’s partnership with United Therapeutics turns into a successful proof of concept that could then be replicated. Short of that result, it could set off a domino effect, he argues, with more pharma space company alliances on the horizon. “It would be fantastic if this partnership yielded a couple or even one blockbuster product or drug that really started opening up profitable business models for pharma in space at scale,” he says.
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One of Varda’s capsules. John Krauss, Varda Space Industries
Hmmmm … A billion Dollars could feed billions of starving children!
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A GOP bill seeking $1 billion for the Secret Service to help finance President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is in jeopardy as it faces pushback from a top Senate official.
The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said Saturday that the budget bill, which aims to fund ICE and Border Patrol alongside $1 billion to help fund the ballroom, needs to be rewritten to account for jurisdictional issues.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough told Senate offices Saturday. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”
The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority, unlike similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation.
Budget reconciliation is a parliamentary tool used to get around the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, but it comes with restrictions on what provisions can be included.
The development is a blow to the Republican bill, but it is not the end of efforts to include ballroom funding. Senate Republicans had already been redrafting the provision’s language before Saturday’s ruling based on feedback from Senate officials, a GOP leadership aide told NBC News.
A spokesperson for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans also told NBC News that “conversations and revisions are continuing, as they have been for days.”
It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likley won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.
Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement Saturday that “the American people shouldn’t spend a single dime on Trump’s gold-plated ballroom boondoggle.”
“While we expect Republicans to change this bill to appease Trump, Democrats are prepared to challenge any change to this bill,” Merkley said. “We cannot let Republicans waste our national treasure on a mission of chaos and corruption while turning a blind eye to the needs of the American people.”
Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, downplayed the setback for the GOP bill Saturday.
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The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority as similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation. Alex Brandon / AP
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
Harmony; Scientific American Illustrations
Mental health
Thomas Fuchs
Photographed by Francesc Planes
James' World 2 