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Every bridge has parts that drivers never see: steel buried in concrete, welds tucked under girders, and soil packed around foundations below the waterline. A bridge can look fine from the road while rust spreads around steel hidden inside concrete. A small fatigue crack can lengthen. A flood can wash soil away from a pier. By the time cracks, loose concrete or lane closures appear, the cheapest repair window may already have closed.

When it comes to these damaged bridges, this problem is national. The United States has more than 624,000 highway bridges. About 220,000 need major repair or replacement, and 41,677 are rated poor, also called structurally deficient. While “poor” does not mean unsafe, it does mean at least one key bridge element received a poor rating, indicating deterioration or cracking that will require significant repair.

As a researcher who studies photonics and quantum sensing, I work on devices that measure faint or hidden signals. My lab applies physics to develop devices, including quantum sensors. Advanced sensors of this type might one day be able to help engineers pinpoint where to look to determine whether hidden damage in infrastructure is worsening. However, they cannot replace human inspectors.

Inspections keep bridges safe, but are snapshots

Federal bridge inspections—rooted in National Bridge Inspection Standards mandated by Congress in 1968—exist because past failures showed that small defects can threaten large structures.

Under current federal rules, many bridges must be inspected in, at most, 24-month intervals. Higher-risk bridges, such as those carrying heavy interstate traffic, those with aging structures or known defects, or those built over saltwater, may require shorter intervals. Lower-risk bridges with lighter traffic and sound materials may qualify for longer intervals.

Those inspections remain essential, but they are snapshots. A bridge may change during the months between visits. Corrosion can spread below a deck that looks sound. A small crack can sit inside a weld. A river can displace soil from a foundation while the roadway above looks unchanged. Sensors extend inspections by tracking these change that form between scheduled checks.

Hidden damage can grow quietly

The three common hidden threats to bridges are corrosion, fatigue, and scour. Corrosion begins when water, oxygen and salts reach steel. A concrete layer usually protects steel, but cracks, salt spray, and chloride ions from seawater or deicing salts can break that protection. The rust then expands, much like ice widening a crack in a sidewalk. It pushes the concrete outward and can cause the material to come loose or the layers to separate.

Fatigue damage is the bridge version of bending a paper clip back and forth. Just as a paper clip eventually snaps after repeated bending, a bridge’s steel components weaken and break down under continuous cycles of stress. Thousands of heavy vehicles can make tiny cracks grow near welds, bolted connections, or older steel details.

Scour damage is different: Moving water removes soil around the bridge’s foundations. The bridge above can look stable, while the support below loses the ground it needs.

Waiting costs more

The earlier engineers can identify damage to aging bridges, the more time and options they have to fix them. The average U.S. bridge is about 47 years old. Many bridges are near or past the 50-year life they were designed for, and about 45 percent have exceeded their planned design lives.

Typically, it’s less costly to preserve bridges in fair condition than those already in poor condition. Making all the identified necessary U.S. bridge repairs would cost about $467 billion.

Past failures show why small details matter. As one example, the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis was partially due to undersized gusset plates—steel plates that connect the intersecting beams in a bridge’s structural framework – along with added weight and construction loads. The collapse killed 13 people and injured 145.

Sensors alone are not a cure for such failures, but better measurements can help engineers notice when important details are changing.

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A child has been rescued from the rubble in Venezuela, six days since the country was hit by devastating twin earthquakes.

The boy, identified by the Reuters news agency as Klieber Moran, was rescued early on Tuesday, the only reported survivor on the sixth day of rescue efforts, according to Venezuelan authorities.

Moran was pulled from the Los Corales Garden ⁠1 building in La Guaira state by rescuers from Jordan, ⁠Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said in a message via ​Telegram.

Venezuela was hit by ‌two earthquakes of ‌magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 less than a minute apart last ‌Wednesday, toppling buildings and trapping thousands of people beneath the rubble, according to authorities and rescue teams.

Moran, described as three years old by Rodríguez, but as two years old by National Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez, was taken for medical treatment, ‌the message said.

“We must hold on to the hope of continuing to find people alive beneath the ​rubble,” Jorge said in a televised address. “Early this morning, a two-year-old boy was rescued and is currently receiving care at a health centre in Caracas.”

A shipment from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, carrying 47 ⁠metric tons of humanitarian supplies arrived in Venezuela on ​Tuesday, UN spokesperson ​Stéphane Dujarric said, adding ​the equipment would help support children and families in ​need.

The shipment ‌includes emergency ​health kits ​for urgent medical care, including supplies for safe births, newborn care, disease prevention, and treatment, Dujarric added.

The government puts the death toll at more than 1,900, with more than 10,000 people injured. Experts say that is a significant undercount as more bodies are hauled from the rubble every day and morgues struggle to handle the influx.

Among the living, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding. UN agencies expressed concern about the health effects of thousands of displaced people sleeping for days in the open, or in crowded, unsanitary shelters.

Nasa estimates that nearly 59,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes, which would put the number of people affected by the quakes in the hundreds of thousands. UNICEF said on Tuesday that 680,000 children are in need of humanitarian assistance nationwide.

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The child was rescued by a team from Jordan, one of many international groups working on the ground. Photograph: Jordan Public Security/Reuters

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Her grass-roots campaign overcame a fund-raising advantage held by Ms. DeGette, who was helped by a last-minute influx of spending from outside groups. Early Wednesday, Ms. Kiros was leading by more than five percentage points with nearly 80 percent of votes counted.

n her campaign biography, Ms. Kiros highlighted the fact that the Manhattan law firm where she once worked had fired her in 2023 after she refused to take down a letter that raised questions about Israel’s historical legitimacy, defended pro-Palestinian campus protesters and challenged the firm’s response to activist law students.

She has faced criticism for declining to call antisemitic a fatal firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., on people who were marching in support of Israeli hostages.

Her victory “is part of a pattern of our democratic socialist politics resonating across the country,” said Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ms. Kiros is a member. “It just shows that Americans want politicians who are going to address the cost of living with universal policies that apply to everybody.”

If she prevails in November, as she is expected to do, Ms. Kiros will join a growing group of left-wing Democrats in Congress who want to see universal, single-payer health care, bans on corporate donations to political campaigns and an end to American support for Israel. Her campaign was bolstered by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

A longtime progressive, Ms. DeGette leads a powerful subcommittee overseeing health care and had said she would push to pass “Medicare for all” if Democrats retook the House. She campaigned heavily on her liberal credentials, running a TV ad that featured Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York praising her support of universal health care. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse anyone in the race.

But Ms. DeGette appeared to find herself increasingly at odds with her own district on issues including American support for Israel and the acceptance of corporate donations to her campaign.

Ms. DeGette in the past has called herself a “strong supporter” of Israel. Her campaign got a boost from late spending by outside groups, including some with connections to pro-Israel PACs. Ms. Kiros argued that those donations made her opponent beholden to special interests rather than to her own constituents.

Denver and its suburbs are far younger and more diverse than they were when Ms. DeGette first won the seat in 1996.

More on the 2026 Midterm Elections

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• Campaign Finance: The Supreme Court lifted limits on how much political parties can spend on advertising and other expenses in coordination with candidates, in a major victory for Republicans.

• Gen Z Runs for Office: In Colorado, Melat Kiros’s Democratic primary challenge to Representative Diana DeGette is the latest Gen Z test in a year defined by generational upheaval.

• Alaska’s Dan Sullivans: The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Dan J. Sullivan could appear on the ballot alongside Senator Dan S. Sullivan, despite arguments from the Republican incumbent that he was not a good-faith candidate.

• U.S. Senate in Texas: The Democrat James Talarico is tied with Ken Paxton, the Republican state attorney general, according to a new poll, giving Democrats a serious chance to win a Senate seat in the state for the first time in a generation.

• Israel and Iran Fracture Both Parties: Raging internal debates over foreign policy threaten both parties’ fortunes in November — and in 2028. Is a major ideological shift underway?

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Melat Kiros, an immigrant and first-time candidate, is likely to head to Congress in a deep-blue Colorado district.

Credit…Chet Strange for The New York Times

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By day, American physicist Kenneth Long works with the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva. He wants to better understand the W boson, a subatomic particle that is responsible for some kinds of radioactivity and for fusion. But he also likes bikes, and this July you might find him on a scenic roadside, cheering on competitors in the Tour de France. He won’t have to take an international flight to spectate: Long moved abroad in February, splitting time between Lyon and Geneva as a scientist with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Long was brought to France by a recruitment program called Choose CNRS. The organization launched it last April, a few months after the Trump administration began cutting scientific programs in the U.S. The initiative aims to lure foreign researchers to Europe with stable positions, generous funding, and promises of academic freedom. For many scientists from the U.S., programs like this one are a lifeline: a way to pursue world-class research without fighting against the funding cuts and disruptive policies currently stifling American science.

According to polls, application numbers and anecdata, many young American scientists are considering such moves. Three quarters of U.S. researchers who responded to a Nature poll conducted last March were thinking about moving abroad. The trend was especially apparent among early-career scientists: of the 690 postdocs and 340 Ph.D. students who responded, 803 said they were considering sailing for other shores.

Nature’s poll went out in the midst of significant threats to the American research enterprise. Last year, the National Science Foundation terminated about $1 billion in grants and fired 10 percent of its employees; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration let roughly the same proportion go, and the National Institutes of Health lost 5 percent of its workers. At that agency, grants amounting to more than $1.8 billion were canceled. The government also proposed large future cuts to the research agencies that award scientists research grants. By early 2026, more than 10,000 people with STEM Ph. D.s had lost or left their jobs because of federal workforce cuts, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Interventions by courts and Congress have prevented or reversed some of the administration’s cuts, but for plenty of researchers, science and academia still feel perilous—particularly for scientists like Long, who are just getting started. “Early-career and younger scientists definitely are affected more,” says Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest professional organizations for researchers. Older, more established scientists have their reputations and track records to rely on when they apply for grants from the smaller pot of money. Early-career scientists who are still forging those reputations will have a harder time getting their first big grants—and fewer of them will be able to do so. “There is an immeasurable level of anxiety,” Carney says.

A Nature poll found that three-quarters of U.S. respondents were thinking of moving abroad.

Other countries are eager to benefit from this turmoil. Canada, for instance, is investing more than $1 billion in getting foreign scientists to come on board and Canadians to come home. The European Union has devoted hundreds of millions to programs designed to attract scientists from other lands. The most geographically expansive is Choose Europe for Science, which was launched last May and includes incentives for younger researchers. The continent-scale initiative is complemented by 100 more from individual countries and regions, and Europe has expedited visa and residency processes so that scientists can capitalize on the opportunities with less bureaucracy. “This is Team Europe in action,” says Maciej Berestecki, a spokesperson for the European Commission.

What all of them offer, according to Berestecki, is to fill the gaps other nations leave. “We offer three things,” he says, “that researchers increasingly cannot take for granted elsewhere: stable and long-term funding, the freedom to pursue bold ideas, and an exceptional quality of life.” It’s not hard to figure out which countries he’s comparing the Continent to. “At a time when science is increasingly under pressure worldwide, Europe stands out ever more clearly as a place where the freedom of scientific research is actively protected and promoted,” Berestecki says. That’s appealing to young researchers who want to be able to build a scientific career and worry less about it being unbuilt underneath them.

Long didn’t initially plan to have a scientific career at all. “I was really thinking maybe I wanted to study theology,” he says, smiling from a Microsoft Teams screen this past March, just a couple of weeks after his big move. “I felt that’s where people answered the great questions of the world.”

Long thinks that those spiritual questions are still important but that they’re harder to answer objectively than those he explores in physics. That’s what he studied at Tennessee Tech University, where he did his undergraduate work. “To be honest, I wanted to get out of Tennessee back then, and I was pretty devastated to go study at a small university,” he says. “But I think in the end it was good for me, and I had very good professors, and sometimes it’s good to stay small.”

At least small was good before he decided to go big. When Long enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he did so in part because of the school’s partnership with CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider. There, scientists like Long gather data to try to understand things smaller than the atom so they can map how they fit together to form our world, our universe. “The most fundamental thing,” Long says, almost wistfully. The questions the collider can study are not really so very different from those theologists do—they just involve a lot more numbers.

Long eventually did a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but spent much of his time back at CERN. Choose CNRS helped him move to France permanently, providing the kind of funding a young researcher needs to transition from precarious temporary worker to established and independent employee. With the program’s start-up funds, Long has been able to hire his own student and postdoc and, for the first time, become a principal investigator. It helps that in France, the research infrastructure is much more centralized, with large, publicly funded science laboratories hiring scientists as permanent civil-servant employees.

“You have relatively more permanent researchers with a lot of research freedom,” Long says. And he doesn’t have to formulate his scientific questions based on what grant might pay him—which in the U.S. depends more on what the government wants to fund. “I think it’s nice to not have to chase your research topics based on what’s hot,” he says. Plus, he gets to play on the CERN soccer team against very European competitors, such as Rolex—a win-win in his view.

Work-life balance is something Finland’s foreign-recruitment efforts also emphasize. In fact, it’s part of the country’s new tagline for its Work in Finland program, which aims in part to bring onboard U.S. scientists and other high-tech talent: “Find your superposition in Finland.”

Superposition” is the quantum ability of a subatomic particle to be in multiple states at once. “We think there is a nice analogy to that,” says Laura Lindeman, senior director and head of business for Work in Finland. “In Finland, you can have both a very beautiful career and other things in your life at the same time.”

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Olga Aleksandrova

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When Hurricane Milton made landfall along Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm on the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 9, hospitals were hunkered down statewide. Even those on the East Coast prepared for the worst. The hospital Baptist Health is situated on the bank of the St. Johns River in downtown Jacksonville, where most days, you can see the reflection of the city’s skyline in the calm waters. But in extreme weather conditions, the river becomes a looming threat to the patients and providers inside.

Hospitals are critical to any community, but Baptist Health serves more people in its emergency room than any other hospital in the county, and its adjoining pediatric hospital, Wolfson Children’s, houses a level IV NICU that serves kids not just in Florida but southeast Georgia, too. When a hurricane is bearing down on them, how is anyone supposed to decide how to keep them safe? And what about the parents giving birth in the labor delivery unit, or coming in for needed C-sections or inductions?

In 2024 alone, the United States endured 27 “climate disaster events” exceeding $1 billion in damages each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Storms battered Florida and Texas, and Hurricane Helene decimated countless homes and businesses in North Carolina, killing 105. The 2025 new year began with the Los Angeles fires, which have destroyed more than 16,000 structures and torched almost 60,000 acres of land so far.

The climate crisis is here, and Mother Nature is demanding our attention. It has become everyone’s problem, and like all systemic problems, it has a particular effect on families. Whether it’s rescheduling one person’s routine induction before a hurricane or a health care desert is created when a hospital burns down and never gets rebuilt, the climate crisis is already changing the way pregnant people, children, and babies get quality health care.

The options for a hospital in a hurricane are simple on the surface: remain open, or close and evacuate. But no two patients are alike, and when you’re talking about birth, well, babies wait for nothing and no one. In fact, incoming hurricanes have a way of making more of them decide it’s time to be born, according to stories from medical experts.

“If we close the door and a pregnant person has nowhere to go, what’s going to happen?” says registered nurse Shannon Wainright, MBA, director of women’s and children’s services at Southeast Georgia Health System in Brunswick. “Our goal is to provide services at a scale that is reasonable during a storm. We’re not going to be doing elective surgeries. We’re not going to be doing anything that’s not necessary, but birth is necessary. These patients are pregnant, and the baby is coming, and oftentimes changes in [barometric] pressure and stress can definitely have an impact on a patient going into labor.”

Tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires happen suddenly, with little to no warning. A report from Stanford University’s & The West includes a harrowing description from a Paradise, California, nurse on duty during the 2018 Camp Fire. Her supervisor assured her they’d be alerted if they needed to leave, and then she looked out the window to see a fire burning just across the parking lot. She and her team evacuated 69 patients via helicopter, ambulance, and the nurses’ own personal vehicles. Natural disasters are one thing, but a failure to evacuate patients in advance can lead to unspeakable tragedies.

When it comes to extreme weather events, hurricanes tend to have the longest lead time. The National Weather Service monitors their formation closely, so there is usually about a week’s notice between when a hurricane’s path is expected to affect weather on land and its actual arrival. Its wind speeds, the direction it’s spinning, whether it will approach at high or low tide — all these factors matter when you’re deciding whether to evacuate a hospital full of patients who need your care.

That said, hospitals nearly always opt to stay open during major weather events. They have a duty to care for first responders who stay behind to help, Wainwright says, and they know pregnant people in their areas don’t get to choose when their babies come. “Labor is such an unpredictable event. It’s one of the many reasons why we feel like it is imperative to stay. I can’t imagine a mom showing up at our door and not being able to get in.”

Wainwright tells me about the rare occasion they evacuated patients during a hurricane in 2017. Most of her prenatal patients with due dates in the coming weeks were instructed to print their prenatal care records and evacuate early. Everyone knew holding off until mandatory orders would lead to traffic on all major roadways, and these women needed to wait out the storm somewhere with a different hospital nearby. Those that could be safely discharged early were sent home. The rest were transported to nearby adult and pediatric hospitals, “which was not fun,” she recalls.

“There’s a website that we all log into, and hospitals put their [available] beds up there. One hospital says, ‘I have this many postpartum beds, I have this many NICU beds, I have this many labor beds, and I have this many critical care.’ We would get on that database, and we would say, ‘We need this many.’ Then hospitals can grab up those patients, call us, and make that connection so we can safely transfer the patient.”

Transferring patients is a huge undertaking, says registered nurse Christine Smith, MSN, vice president of patient care services for Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville. The Baptist Health system has seven inpatient hospital locations, and the one closest to the coast was evacuated during Hurricane Irma. “It takes a village. It’s not just the hospital doing that but the city,” she says. To evacuate, hospitals coordinate with local EMS and, one by one via ambulance ride, take patients (including NICU babies and laboring parents, if they’re there) to other facilities.

But with robust generator systems, most hospitals don’t fear losing power. And thanks to innovative flood prevention barriers, they don’t have to close just in case the storm surge gets too high either. “During Milton, we were most concerned with flooding from the river based on how that storm was coming across the state and what we thought was going to happen when high tide hit,” says Allegra C. Jaros, MBA, president of Wolfson Children’s Hospital. To keep the river out of the lobby, their facilities team erected waterproof barriers ahead of the storm, allowing operations inside to continue uninterrupted.

Because the hospital is fortified with an emergency generator system to keep medical equipment functioning in the event of a power outage, they also make room for children in the community who rely on power to sustain their lives, like those on ventilators. There are 43 such families in the Jacksonville area who are registered to ride out the storms inside the hospital, where their kids will be safe.

As for scheduled C-sections and inductions, those procedures get assessed one by one to determine if they’re still on. That means nursing leadership is calling OB-GYNs and midwives to ask about each individual patient on the schedule.

“Women have babies 24/7. It’s about figuring out who needs to come in, and who can be put off safely, if need be,” says Dr. Tiffany Wells, M.D., vice chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville. Medically necessary inductions or C-sections take priority, she says. “Generally, if we have to limit anything, the elective inductions will be taken away first to reserve space.”

During 2017’s Hurricane Irma, Wells slept in an office onsite for three days in between caring for patients. The storm caused record flooding throughout the city, and Baptist Health’s basement — which houses its generators — also took on water. “That created an emergency,” she says. “We had to physically move all of our labor and delivery patients from one side of the hospital to the other until they made sure everything was safe to move everyone back.” A veritable moat formed around the base of the hospital. From inside, Wells could see cars driving on I-95 and taking the exit ramp to approach the hospital, before having to reverse back up the ramp and look for another route.

The picture Wainwright paints of sheltering in the hospital during that storm sounds like the sweetest kind of community — nurses bringing in food from home to have meals potluck-style, with patients and their families grabbing plates too. Getting weather updates here and there as they circulate on the floor, hearing different bits of info from each patient as they go and catching glimpses of the weather radar on the TVs in their rooms. “We’d talk about their stories of where their family was and did they evacuate, and they’d want to know the same about us,” she says.

Wainwright, and many caregivers like her, usually persuade their families to get out of dodge before the evacuation order is issued. “I don’t want to have to worry about them when there’s so much to focus on at work,” she says. “It feels good to know they’re gone. They worry about me a lot.” She shared that in the aftermath of storms, nurses and doctors have organized rides for colleagues who couldn’t get their cars out of their neighborhoods due to flooding or downed trees, bringing each other clothes and shoes to work in when their homes flooded. Workers sometimes stay on-site until their homes are safe to return to. With all the generators, water barriers, and safety measures at their disposal, hospitals are often the safest place to be in a storm.

But the number of helpers running towards the onslaught of natural disasters will soon dwindle. There will be a massive nationwide shortage of providers in the next decade. OB-GYNs, pediatricians, and family medicine providers are three disciplines notorious for being compensated less than their colleagues in other specialties, and they’re among the most likely doctors to be sued, making recruiting new grads difficult. On a planet that is heating up, freezing over, and generally seething at our presence, we know natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity. When there are fewer of these specialists picking up calls about whose C-sections are medically necessary during a hurricane, or whether a NICU baby can be safely relocated to another facility via ambulance, it is once again the health of parents and children that will suffer.

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Emma Chao/Romper; Getty

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The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

The returns, which had been something of a mystery, highlight a conflict in the president’s crypto business: Not only is Mr. Trump a major crypto industry operator, but he is also its top policymaker. 

It is hardly the only issue to arise from having a businessman serve as president. The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though in the past, Mr. Trump has noted that he is exempt from federal conflict of interest laws.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a recent statement that Mr. Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”

Although the report released on Tuesday offered revenue figures for Mr. Trump’s crypto and real estate ventures, it did not reveal whether all of the businesses turned a profit or a loss, which is consistent with his previous filings.

What is clear from the report, however, is that Mr. Trump’s crypto operation was a top money maker.

Once an outspoken skeptic of crypto, Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail in 2024 and started a series of ventures that have reaped enormous sums.

With his three sons, he helped create World Liberty, a crypto firm that sells a digital currency called $WLFI.

Last year, World Liberty marketed its coin to investors around the world, with 75 percent of each sale allocated to a Trump business entity, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing the president would make money even if the value of the token declined.

World Liberty enriched the Trump family in other ways, as well. In January 2025, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty for $500 million, raising a slew of ethical concerns. Soon, the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips that power artificial intelligence.

The filing released Tuesday did not explicitly refer to the deal, but it mentioned unnamed investments that generated more than $200 million for Mr. Trump.

The other major source of Mr. Trump’s crypto wealth was his memecoin, a novelty currency known as $TRUMP that he started selling days before his inauguration. He earned more than $600 million from sales of the coin, according to the filing.

The coin’s price shot up briefly, before plummeting, with its price now hovering at $1.67, an 80 percent drop from a year ago.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Fed Vulnerable to Trump: President Trump promised to “take appropriate action immediately” against Lisa Cook, the Fed governor he had tried to fire, even as the Supreme Court affirmed that Fed officials can be fired only for cause.

• Billion-Dollar Mining Deal: An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the president and the commerce secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.

• White House Pressure Campaign: Behind the scenes, the Trump White House went to extensive lengths to advance its theory of executive power, potentially giving the president remarkable leeway to install loyalists at nearly every echelon of government.

• New ICE Director: The president said he was nominating Lance Schroyer, an adviser to Markwayne Mullin, the D.H.S. secretary, to lead the high-profile agency.

• Informants for the Trump Administration: President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has pushed back against U.S. investigations into Mexican politicians. Now some politicians want to cooperate.

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President Trump entering the White House on Sunday. His mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 pulled back the curtain on his secretive business operations. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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In late May, in broad daylight, residents across Massachusetts and beyond saw a brilliant flash in the sky, followed by two sonic booms that rattled windows, shook houses, and prompted a flood of 911 calls. Some people thought they had just experienced an earthquake. Others thought it was thunder, an explosion, or a military flyover.

But the true source of all the commotion was out of this world—literally. A small meteoroid, about five feet wide and as heavy as an elephant, had entered the atmosphere at a blinding 42,000 miles per hour before disintegrating dozens of miles above the ground. The midair explosion released a pressure wave equivalent to 230–300 tons of TNT, and any surviving fragments likely fell into Cape Cod Bay.

The story quickly captivated an American public already more space-crazed than usual, thanks to the recent success of Artemis II. However, it has also served as a stark reminder that space is not as benign or empty as it may seem. Rather, our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles—not just meteoroids but larger bodies, such as comets, asteroids, and other cosmic detritus—and Earth is right in the firing line. Earlier in May, for instance, the newly discovered asteroid 2026 JH2, estimated at 50 to 115 feet wide, missed Earth by a “mere” 56,000 miles. Had it been on a collision course, it could have easily destroyed a big city.

But even that would not have been humanity’s worst nightmare scenario. After all, some celestial Goliaths can run a lot larger than JH2—large enough to decimate entire countries and even continents. British physicist Stephen Hawking believed that a cosmic impact poses one of the greatest threats to humanity, far greater than any global pandemic or terrestrial natural disaster. The question is not if we will suffer a direct hit but when.

Unfortunately, we humans would be powerless against a rare giant projectile many miles in diameter. Unlike the dinosaurs, we might well see the approach of a six-mile-wide killer asteroid, like the one that collided with Earth 66 million years ago. However, stopping it or deflecting its course is out of the question: It would be like trying to stop an oncoming truck by throwing ping-pong balls at it. And although we’ve discovered the vast majority of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than about two-thirds of a mile across, finding that none are on a collision course with Earth, astronomers could very well discover an enormous comet next week that will crash into the planet in a few years’ time. And again, there’s nothing we could do to stop it.

If we do want to protect ourselves from cosmic impacts, we need to focus on medium-sized objects, ranging from about 100 yards to about a half a mile. These are relatively numerous, and they can easily cause many tens of millions of casualties. Earth is hit by a 400-yard asteroid on average once every 100,000 years. If the collision occurs in Europe, a country like France will disappear completely from the map, and the entire continent will become an unimaginable disaster area. Such an impact is, in theory, preventable, so we would be crazy not to explore the possibilities of doing just that.

That’s what Dutch astrophysicist Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, thought too. A few years after the 1998 Hollywood blockbusters Deep Impact and Armageddon brought the general public face-to-face with the possibility of an impact, Hut organized a workshop on how to avert such doomsday scenarios. A year later, in October 2002, together with a fellow astronomer and two former astronauts, he founded the B612 Foundation—a private nonprofit foundation that aimed to investigate how to deflect approaching celestial bodies.

Ten years ago, the foundation had ambitious plans to launch a satellite, called Sentinel, that would search for potentially dangerous asteroids. Although the project was canceled for lack of funds, the B612 Foundation remains one of the leading advocates of serious research into planetary defense techniques.

Meanwhile, government organizations such as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are not sitting idly by.

NASA has its own Planetary Defense Coordination Office, while ESA has invested in NEOShield and NEOShield-2, European Union–funded research programs that studied the most plausible methods for asteroid deflection. The U.S. National Science and Technology Council has developed its own National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy, and even within the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), there is an action team addressing the threat of cosmic impacts. In addition to its own International Asteroid Warning Network, the UN now has a Space Mission Planning Advisory Group.

Needless to say, many, many meetings are being held now on how to protect humanity from attacks by the cosmos.

How will we protect Earth?

When it comes to protecting Earth from a fatal collision, there are a number of ideas currently under consideration, ranging from good to bad to very bad.

For example, blowing an asteroid up with an atomic bomb, as happened in “Armageddon,” is not a smart idea. It is an option that Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” proposed long ago, but it simply wouldn’t help. The numerous fragments created in such an explosion would still be moving through the solar system in more or less the same direction and at the original high speed. As a result, Earth would then have to endure not one big impact but a whole series of smaller ones, with all the attendant consequences.

A more practical solution would be to slightly deflect the approaching celestial body so that it passes close to Earth rather than colliding with it. Particularly if you can see the impact coming many years in advance, a small nudge can be enough to avert disaster. When astronomers discovered the 1,100-foot-wide near-Earth object Apophis, which for a while looked as if it would wreak havoc on Earth in 2029, they were already calculating that a minimal change in speed of just a few micrometers per second would be enough to prevent that anticipated catastrophe. Luckily, in the case of Apophis, there’s no need to intervene: The asteroid will safely fly by the Earth on April 13, 2029, at a distance of some 20,000 miles.

Still, for what it’s worth, NASA did manage to execute its first successful intentional asteroid deflection test rather recently: In September 2022, it deflected a small celestial body when the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally slammed into the 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos, successfully changing its orbit around the larger parent body Didymos.

Meanwhile, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the HAMMER project is on the drawing board. HAMMER (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response) is a celestial battering ram, 10 yards long and weighing almost 9 tons, that can be fired at high velocity at a small near-Earth object. With a 10-year warning period, it could deflect a 100-yard-wide object enough to prevent an impact. If something larger is speeding toward Earth, you just send out 10 or 20 HAMMERs. Or 50, or 100. Admittedly, that is a hugely expensive proposition, but if it means you can save 100 million lives, cost is obviously a secondary consideration.

Incidentally, there is a cheaper way to nudge a small asteroid out of its original orbit: just place a giant rocket motor on its surface. If a small rocket motor can transport a launcher into space, a big one should let you accelerate or decelerate an entire NEO at least a tiny bit. As for the raw material needed for the rocket fuel, you could use the composition of the asteroid itself: Hydrogen can be extracted from ice, and oxygen from rock. Or, rather than using a rocket motor, you simply catapult material from the NEO into space at high speed. That is, thanks to Newton’s third law—every action produces an equal and opposite reaction—which results in a kind of rocket effect in the opposite direction.

Thermodynamics could also be of use. For instance, we could heat a small area on one side of the asteroid until the surface material evaporates and jets off into space. The effect is the same as that of a rocket engine on the surface: Gas is blasted away in one direction, propelling the asteroid a tiny bit in the other direction. If you can set a piece of paper or a shoelace on fire using a magnifying glass, you can also focus sunlight on the surface of an asteroid using a large swarm of satellites equipped with gigantic lenses. Additionally, an entire fleet of laser cannons is an option, as is a nuclear explosion at a short distance from the celestial projectile. Another suggestion is to wrap an approaching NEO in thin, reflective foil, either strengthening or weakening the Yarkovsky effect (i.e., the tiny “push” that sunlight exerts on a rotating asteroid). Giving it a once-over with a can of spray paint is another way to achieve the same result.

Finally, perhaps the least invasive option would involve what’s known as a gravity tractor, developed by former astronaut Ed Lu (cofounder of the B612 Foundation) and his colleague Stan Love. The device, which might be a large, heavy space probe, would fly alongside the near-Earth object for an extended period (years to decades) and slowly drag it away from its collision course. The probe would need to keep its rocket engine on the whole time; otherwise, it would be pulled in by the celestial body’s gravity. With a bit of careful maneuvering and enough time, you could pull a killer asteroid into a safe orbit.

It’s not too late

It goes without saying that all of these planetary defense strategies sound rather fantastical. And that’s to say nothing of the complex political obstacles to the whole idea of planetary defense.

Suppose a relatively small near-Earth object is speeding toward our planet, threatening to wipe the city of Dallas (whose population is over a million) off the map. Will Russia and China be willing to help pay for a “rescue mission?” Do Americans have money to spare for the preservation of Chengdu? Do people in Europe care about Zimbabwe’s possible fate? American astronomer Carl Sagan foresaw yet another problem: If a country has the capability to deflect a small asteroid so that it passes close to Earth, the same technology can also be used to bring the asteroid down on an enemy. On this basis, the utopian concept of planetary defense could also turn into a celestial version of the Cold War—or worse.

These are exactly the kinds of issues that are on the agenda of the UN special committee dealing with the threat of cosmic impacts.

For the time being, any form of consensus is still a long way off. Nonetheless, something has to be done. If you are in the firing line, you have to protect and defend yourself as best you can. We must identify the danger, study all the conceivable countermeasures, and be ready to act when necessary. As with fighting the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis, the urgency of the problem will likely only sink in when the need arises. Hopefully, it won’t be too late by then.

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ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images

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The strawberry full moon in Capricorn rises on June 29 at 7:56 p.m. Eastern Time. Notably, the moon signifies when the fruit is in bloom, conveying virtue and the richness in life. It is a lunation of reflection and sympathy that gives us the opportunity to foster love and nurture our spirits.

As the first full moon of the summer, and the last full micromoon of the year, it marks a period when practicality clashes with passion, and impulsivity juxtaposes with caution. The strawberry moon aspects Neptune in Aries, a planet known to be extremely tender, but also deceptive. We will be challenging structures we’ve previously built, and trying to comprehend what is tangible and real versus what is based on our illusions.

In true Capricorn fashion, we must give our all to what speaks to our hearts. Fernando Salinas, author of The Joy of Tarot, says, “This full moon is all about recognizing that there is a magic to discipline, and that you have to be diligent if you’re going to get the gold medal in the end. I want for you to manifest something huge, something big—think of the mountain the goat of Capricorn has to climb—and then I want you to take one big step towards accomplishing it.”Approximately six and a half hours before the full moon occurs, Mercury also turns retrograde in Cancer. This cosmic back-and-forth is going to cause miscommunications and travel delays, ultimately testing our patience. Be cognizant of the shifts in the sky to avoid dramatic flare-ups with others. And most importantly, we should be gentle with ourselves.

To read the entire strawberry full moon horoscope in addition to Aries, click the link below the picture:

Aries

You’ve achieved so much on the professional front, but you never took a moment to honor and appreciate your accomplishments. The strawberry full moon urges you to celebrate yourself by recognizing how far you have come in a short amount of time—and also, what is possible in the foreseeable future. Cheers and toast to your lucrative career—past, present, and future!

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Shortly after the Supreme Court blocked President Trump from immediately ousting a sitting governor from the Federal Reserve, the president struck a defiant note, signaling he would not surrender his long-running fight to gain more sway over one of the most important stewards of the U.S. economy.

In the eyes of Mr. Trump, the 5-to-4 decision reached by the justices on Monday amounted only to a legal setback, not an insurmountable defeat. Even as the court acknowledged the century-old tradition of political independence at the nation’s central bank, it did not totally foreclose on the president’s ability to try to dismiss its officials in the future.

On one hand, the court concluded that Mr. Trump had erred when he first tried to oust Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor, over unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud last year. Siding with a lower court, which had allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her role while the case played out, a majority of the justices said the Trump administration should have afforded Ms. Cook the formal ability to contest the accusations against her.

But the Supreme Court left much unresolved. The justices did not clearly articulate the full legal criteria that would allow Mr. Trump to fire Ms. Cook, who denies any wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime. Nor did they wager an opinion on the exact allegations against her. And the court majority did not even prescribe the exact venue in which Ms. Cook should be allowed to respond to the allegations.

The president did not hesitate to seize on that legal ambiguity. In a social media post, he described the decision as merely a “procedural” matter and vowed to “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

The outcome left many legal scholars on edge, particularly given Mr. Trump’s well-documented desire to install more of his supporters at the top ranks of the central bank as part of his pursuit for lower borrowing costs.

“It may look to be an attempt to quiet the temptation by presidents to meddle with the Fed, but I read it in the opposite direction,” said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s an invitation for more meddling.”

He added: “This saga is not over.”

Ms. Cook still found reason to celebrate on Monday, as she conveyed in a statement after the court’s decision.

“Today’s ruling affirms a principle that has underpinned sound economic stewardship for generations: that the Federal Reserve must make all its policy decisions guided by evidence and independent judgment, free from political interference,” Ms. Cook wrote. “I am grateful for this decision, not for my own sake, but for the sake of the American people, whose economic well-being depends on a central bank that answers to its mission, not political intimidation,” she added.

Those stakes loomed large over the Supreme Court as it wrestled with Mr. Trump’s power over the Fed, and they appeared to factor heavily into the opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

The liberal and conservative justices at one point cited the “ruinous financial panics” that had dotted the nation’s history, as they acknowledged the importance of a central bank that can operate free from political influence. And they channeled the country’s founders as they spoke to “the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy.”

In addition to allowing Ms. Cook to keep her job for the time being, the split decision shot down the Trump administration’s argument that judges had no power to review its decision to fire a Fed official. It also undercut the premise that the president had nearly limitless ability to determine the conditions that would warrant such a removal.

Chief Justice Roberts said a decision accepting the view of Mr. Trump and his aides “would allow the president to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after.” That, the opinion said, “would turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment.”

For Scott Alvarez, the former general counsel for the Fed, the decision on Monday “helped to reinforce the court as a guardrail for Fed independence.” But it did not make the central bank impenetrable to further political encroachment.

For one, the Cook ruling was paired with a separate decision that vastly expanded the power of the executive branch by affirming Mr. Trump’s ability to fire all other independent regulators. In her dissent in Ms. Cook’s case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the decision to safeguard the Fed’s independence was “in serious tension” with the court’s ruling on the other agencies.

By invalidating the independence of those agencies, said Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the central bank’s claim to that autonomy was more “precarious” given that for the last 90 years, “the Fed’s independence has really grown alongside the independence of other agencies.”

“There’s a path forward for the Fed to maintain meaningful independence, but it’s going to require more work to justify that independence in a way that really distinguishes it,” Ms. Judge added.

The saga around Ms. Cook began last year, after Bill Pulte, then the federal housing director, accused the Fed governor of misrepresenting her finances in order to obtain more favorable mortgage terms. His allegations soon prompted Mr. Trump to demand that Ms. Cook resign, before the president later moved to fire her.

Mr. Pulte, whom Mr. Trump has since tapped to serve as the director of national intelligence, previously said he referred the matter to the Justice Department. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, he asserted on social media that he believed Ms. Cook “will be indicted for mortgage fraud.”

The justices’ ruling in the case was narrow in a number of ways. The Supreme Court did not explain the conditions that would allow Mr. Trump to fire a Fed official for “cause,” the undefined criteria specified in the central bank’s chartering statute. It opposed Mr. Trump’s argument that presidents have uncontested authority to decide what qualifies as “cause,” but it also did not endorse Ms. Cook’s view that there was a high bar to meet.

Nor did the justices opine on the charges levied against Ms. Cook, citing the fact that she had not been afforded an opportunity to respond to the allegations, as required by law. That failure to give Ms. Cook the chance for rebuttal contributed heavily to the justices’ decision to allow her to continue serving at the Fed.

“To be clear, the ultimate question of whether the president can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” the majority wrote. “In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts, as they have yet to be found or analyzed under the relevant legal standards. Rather, we have simply addressed the parties’ arguments about the appropriate legal standards under which the facts must be evaluated.”

By leaving so many questions unanswered, the court gave Mr. Trump an opening to keep fighting, even if it is clear a majority does not want him to keep interfering with the Fed.

“This punt to the future is mostly a hope that the Trump administration and successive administrations will abandon this effort to meddle with the Federal Reserve,” Mr. Conti-Brown said.

Our Coverage of the Supreme Court

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• Weedkiller Lawsuit: The Supreme Court sided with the manufacturer of Roundup, overturning a jury award for a Missouri man who claimed the widely used herbicide caused cancer in a decision that could have sweeping impacts on thousands of other Americans who similarly claim the product sickened them.

• Hawaii Gun Law: The justices struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission before carrying a firearm onto private property like grocery stores, coffee shops and gas stations that are otherwise open to the public.

• Religious Rights Case: The court said that a Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison guards could not sue state employees for money.

• Assets Seized by Cuba: The justices cleared the way for Exxon Mobil to seek compensation from Cuban-owned entities over oil and gas assets the Communist country seized in 1960. 

• Securities and Exchange Commission: The court ruled that the S.E.C. can recover money that companies and individuals gained illegally, even if the agency is unable to prove that investors suffered a financial loss.

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President Trump renewed his threat to fire Lisa D. Cook. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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