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It’s officially squeak season.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s March Madness is right around the corner. The National Basketball Association (NBA) is fresh off its All-Star break, with the playoffs on the horizon. The playoffs for the women’s three-on-three league Unrivaled start this weekend—and Angel Reese will be back!

So turn on your TV and pump up the volume. Try tuning out the color commentary, the pulsating music, and the “defense” chants, and what you’ll hear is basketball’s true soundtrack: a symphony of squeaks.

Today, in a study published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists have made a “Wemby”-sized stride forward on the timeless scientific mystery of why basketball sneakers make those joyful noises.

“We were not expecting to find so much richness and depth, from a physics point of view, underneath the sole of a shoe,” says Adel Djellouli, a scientist at Harvard University and co-lead author of the study.

Most scientists who had considered the problem believed that shoe squeaks were a straightforward example of the common “stick-slip phenomenon.”

It’s easy to see stick-slip in action. Just plop a heavy book on a table and try to gently slide it across. Instead of a smooth slide, you’ll get a jerky, stop-and-start kind of motion.

Basketball squeaks, the theory went, were an example of the same phenomenon. When a player stopped on a dime, their shoe’s rubbery sole would slip slightly—many times per second in the same stop-and-start pattern—producing a squeak. This is how violins work and why a squeaky door hinge rings at a lower pitch when you open it slowly.

But with the power of high-speed cameras and acoustic analysis, Djellouli and his co-authors have shown that basketball shoes are special. 

It’s all about the bumps. Those long, raised patterns of ridges that line the bottom of a sneaker are really the maestros of basketball’s soundscape. Watch the bottom of a shoe rubbing against the hardwood in slow motion, and you’ll see.

The sole’s ridges don’t lift and stick all at once. Rather, only a tiny part of each ridge separates from the ground at any one time. That pocket of separation glides down the ridge until it reaches the end of the sole, at which point the air outside the shoe receives a little kick. Those separation waves ripple down the ridges thousands of times per second, kicking the air rhythmically. The rate of kicks is exactly the frequency of the squeak—the faster the kicks, the higher the pitch.

That frequency depends on the shape of each ridge, which guides the waves down with a characteristic speed. “The idea of a waveguide for friction was not known,” says Gabriele Albertini, a structural engineer at the University of Nottingham in England and Djellouli’s co-lead author. To demonstrate their finding, the scientists reverse-engineered rectangular blocks of synthetic sole with distinct pitches. They were even able to play Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars on a piece of glass. “It took us three days to rehearse,” Djellouli says. “We could have just shown it in a graph, but where’s the fun in that?”

The sneaker study falls under the larger umbrella of “bimaterial friction,” the special physics of two different materials rubbing together. The phenomenon of two different faults slipping against each other to produce an earthquake, for instance, is much like a sneaker rubbing on hardwood. Rather than the entire fault stopping and starting, ripples of separation move along it, similarly to what happens with the sneaker. The team believes its rubber setup could become an easy way to study earthquake physics in a lab.

“This is a more advanced and technically sophisticated analysis of a problem I dipped my toe into 20 years ago,” says Martyn Shorten, a stick-slip expert at BioMechanica, a consulting firm in Oregon. “I love it!”

So next time you see NBA player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander take someone’s ankles, remember that the spectacle’s squeaky score is something to behold as well. And when you cop your favorite player’s new signature shoe, you’re buying a finely tuned musical instrument that simulates an earthquake with every step. Who knows—maybe we’re just a few years off from “signature squeaks!”

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As I cheer on my sister, Amber Glenn, during her first-ever Olympics, I’m so proud of the person and athlete she is. And, of course, with that love comes a fierce desire to protect her from the ugliness and hate I’m seeing online.

Recently, Amber was interviewed by our longtime friend Ashley Cain, the cohost of the Flame Bearers and Culxtured series Making It to Milan, about Amber’s journey to the Games, equity in sports, and her advice for young athletes. I was thrilled to be a part of her episode, too, and talk about what it means to me to see someone I love so much finally get the honor and recognition she deserves.

Amber has always been exceptional. In a sport where longevity often leads to burnout, she has stayed relentlessly devoted to her dream. After more than a decade in international figure skating, three consecutive US national champion titles, and now a gold medal at her very first Olympics, she’s shown the world that she fights for her dreams and doesn’t give up.

The same goes for her beliefs and values. Amber has always been unapologetically exactly who she is. For Amber, being the first out LGBTQ+ woman on a US Olympic figure skating team means more than just a footnote in her bio. She wears the Pride flag pin not for attention or because it’s on trend, but because she’s had to fight to love herself unconditionally, and she wants the same for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

You may be wondering what my sister said to bring on such vicious hatred. When asked at a press conference about her views on Trump’s impact on the LGBTQ+ community, she responded: “It’s been a hard time for the [LGBTQ+] community overall in this administration. It isn’t the first time that we’ve had to come together as a community and try and fight for our human rights.”

She never expressed a lack of respect or a lack of appreciation for this country. She simply spoke about what millions of Americans are living right now, as shown in the more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced in the US so far this year, according to the ACLU. That’s when the hate started pouring in. This isn’t criticism; this is an attempt to strip away someone’s humanity, all because what she’s saying is different and scary to them.

Especially now, as Amber prepares for one of the biggest moments of her career, she should not have to carry the hate she has received while also trying to land her jumps. No athlete should. We say we want people to be authentic, then we recoil when they are. We say athletes are role models, then we demand they stay silent about their own lives. We celebrate them right up until they make us uncomfortable, and then we say they are horrible people.

For me, there was never a question of whether or not I would love and support my sister unconditionally—love doesn’t have strings attached. Neither does allyship. Our parents taught us to treat all people with love and respect, even if we don’t understand where they’re coming from. You don’t have to be LGBTQ+ (or even understand what it means) to agree that people deserve to be who they are, and love who they love, without receiving hate.

Allyship is supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s kind of the point. It gives us just a taste of what the people we care about deal with day in and day out. If it makes us feel overwhelmed, we can imagine how they must feel all the time. Through the years, I’ve seen the beautiful and terrifying sides of people reflected through sports. I’ve seen how sports can bring people together across divides, and how groups and platforms like Flame Bearers champion women exactly as they are. I’ve also seen the way that people use sport as a space to promote bigotry, declaring that there’s only one way to be an athlete, a woman, an American.

When I see my sister with her teammates, beaming with pride, I think of the good in sports. Beyond any medal, seeing my sister happy is the greatest victory. Seeing all the positive comments in Flame Bearers’ feed reminds me that there are other people out there who celebrate diversity and lead with compassion. I’m going to keep looking toward the light, and doing all I can to outshine the dark.

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“Something like this dispute was inevitable,” said Michael C. Horowitz, who worked on A.I. weapons issues in the Defense Department during the Biden administration. “Because the technology is advancing so quickly, we’re having these debates now. A.I. has moved from being in a niche conversation to something really at the center of global power.”

An hour before the deadline on Friday, President Trump weighed in on the fight, posting on social media that he would “NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” That decision, he said, “belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.”

The clash centers on the Pentagon’s use of a classified version of Anthropic’s A.I. model, Claude. The company wants to embed safeguards in its technology to prevent its use for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop.

The Pentagon has said that it has no plans to use the technology for those purposes, but that a private contractor cannot decide how its tools will be lawfully used for national security, just as a weapons manufacturer does not determine where its missiles are dropped.

At the Pentagon, the dispute comes at an important moment. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News contributor who has lashed out at policies and companies he sees as too liberal, wants to aggressively integrate A.I. in war planning and weapons development. Mr. Hegseth is echoing Mr. Trump, who has made the expansion of A.I. a cornerstone of his policies.

But Anthropic, a five-year-old company worth about $380 billion, has staked its reputation on A.I. safety and raised concerns about the technology’s dangers, even as it has collaborated with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. It is the only A.I. company currently operating on the Pentagon’s classified systems.

In recent days, the Pentagon and Anthropic have showed no signs of backing down. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, posted on social media on Thursday that the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic allow it to use A.I. “for all lawful purposes,” saying it was a “common-sense request.”

In response, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” Anthropic was prepared to lose its government contract and help the Pentagon transition to another company’s technology, he said.

Without a compromise, Mr. Hegseth has threatened to invoke the rarely used Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to work with it on its terms, or designate the company a supply chain threat and block it from doing business with the government.

The confrontation has created new divisions between Silicon Valley and Washington at a moment when the industry seemed in step with President Trump’s tech-forward agenda, especially as Google, xAI, and OpenAI are also involved in A.I. work with the Pentagon.

On Thursday, nearly 50 OpenAI employees and 175 Google employees published a letter calling on their leaders to “refuse the Department of War’s current demands.” More than 100 employees who work on Google’s A.I. technology expressed concern in another letter to company leaders about working with the Pentagon. Prominent technologists, including Jeff Dean, a top Google executive, have also said they are concerned about how A.I. can be misused for surveillance.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)

A little over two years ago, A.I. safety and regulation was a top concern. At a global summit hosted in Britain by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the United States, China, and 26 other countries signed a pledge to address some of the technology’s potential risks, such as giving hackers new attack methods and accelerating disinformation.

But as the A.I. race ramped up, the issue has faded as a priority. Last year, the Trump administration revoked safety policies imposed under President Biden. Mr. Trump signed an executive order in December aimed at undercutting state laws that regulate A.I. He has also lifted restrictions on exports of A.I. semiconductors, despite concerns that the components could help rivals like China.

The European Union, which passed far-reaching A.I. regulations in 2024, is now considering rolling some back. At the United Nations, a yearslong effort to ban certain A.I. weapons has been stalled by opposition from the United States, Russia, and other countries.

On the battlefield, the war in Ukraine has ushered in an era of drone warfare that turned autonomous weapons from a futuristic possibility to a near-term reality.

“As A.I. becomes more powerful and more capable, the incentives to use it also become much stronger,” said Helen Toner, an A.I. policy expert at Georgetown University and former OpenAI board member. “At the same time, people’s appetite to talk about risks and how to solve them has gone down.”

Ms. Toner said the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute showed a fundamental disconnect. In Washington, officials view A.I. as a new tool that can be harnessed for specific goals. In Silicon Valley, creators of the technology see it becoming more like an “entity” with sophisticated reasoning that may behave in unexpected and dangerous ways without oversight and refinement, she said.

The fight between the Pentagon and Anthropic began on Jan. 9, when Mr. Hegseth published a memo calling for A.I. companies to remove restrictions on their technologies.

“The time is now to accelerate A.I. integration, and we will put the full weight of the Department’s leadership, resources, and expanding corps of private sector partners into accelerating America’s Military A.I. Dominance,” he wrote.

Underpinning Mr. Hegseth’s strategy was a fundamental shift in military technology. Hardware is in an age of decline. Military contractors have struggled to deliver ships and fighter planes on time and on budget.

Software has become an increasingly powerful tool. Tech executives, including Alex Karp, the chief executive of the data analytics company Palantir, which works closely with the federal government, have argued that America’s competitive edge over adversaries will be found in its advances with software.

Anthropic has been a willing partner, providing the government with a special version of Claude that has fewer restrictions. Yet some in the Pentagon viewed the start-up with suspicion. Its openness to talking about safety risks put off some in the department’s leadership, who have called the San Francisco company “woke.”

When talks between the Pentagon and Anthropic began over a $200 million contract for use of A.I. in classified systems, lawyers from both sides quietly traded emails over contract language, said two people involved in the discussions.

Anthropic asked for two things. The company said it was willing to loosen its restrictions on the technology, but wanted guardrails to stop its A.I. from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved. Without those, Anthropic risks damaging its safety-first reputation.

“This is really about the power of the state to determine how A.I. is being deployed in the world versus companies,” said Robert Trager, co-director of Oxford University’s Martin A.I. Governance Initiative.

Cordula Droege, the chief lawyer for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has called for global limits on A.I. weapons, said the violent risks of introducing swarms of autonomous weapons on battlefields is being lost in the wider debate.

“Throughout history, warfare goes in parallel with the development of technology,” she said.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Inquiry of Ex-Officials: A U.S. attorney in Miami is said to be expanding the scope of an investigation into former officials involved in scrutinizing Trump during his first campaign and term.

• Downed Drone: The U.S. shot down a drone belonging to the Homeland Security Department over a Texas border town, prompting the F.A.A. to shutter nearby airspace, according to four people familiar with what transpired.

• Iran: As they made their public case for another U.S. attack, President Trump and his aides made claims about Iran’s weapons and nuclear program that were either false or unproven.

• Voter Data: The Trump administration sued five states to obtain unredacted voter registration databases, in pursuit of baseless claims of voter fraud.

• Sanctions Against U.N. Official: The family of a U.N. expert on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories sued Trump and top officials, challenging sanctions imposed against her over her views of the war in Gaza.

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The Pentagon has said that a private contractor cannot decide how its tools will be lawfully used for national security. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Heart disease is the top cause of death for women in the U.S.; it kills more of them than all forms of cancer combined. But the unique signs and symptoms of heart disease in women are more likely go undetected and untreated than those in men.

The dangers heart disease poses to women may be about to get worse, according to a new analysis. Based on national data between 2010 to 2020, researchers project that, by 2050, the prevalence of serious cardiovascular disease and stroke in women in the U.S. will rise from 10.7 percent to 14.4 percent—affecting more than 22 million people. And that’s not counting high blood pressure.

The study, published today in Circulation, also shows an alarming uptick of disease in younger women: nearly a third of all women between age 20 and 44 will be diagnosed with some form of cardiovascular disease by 2050.

Amanda Montañez; Source: “Forecasting the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in Women in the United States through 2050: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association,” by Karen E. Joynt et al., in Circulation, Vol. 153. Published online February 25, 2026 (data)

The projection is “really a wake-up call,” says Karen Joynt Maddox, lead author of the study and a cardiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also vice chair of the Council on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research at the American Heart Association, which publishes these forecasts every year.

“Despite all of our amazing advances in treating cardiovascular disease, we have not made many advances in preventing the disease. And in fact, the projections would suggest that we’re doing worse and worse in preventing the cardiovascular risk factors,” she says.

The estimates represent a setback in the fight against cardiovascular disease, says C. Noel Bairey Merz, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.

“We had this idea that maybe by the end of this century, cardiovascular disease would be a rare condition,” Bairey Merz says. “Up until 2010, we had gotten cardiovascular disease down to one in four women, and now we’re back to one in three. It’s a sad reality.”

Hypertension—a form of high blood pressure that is an early risk factor of heart disease—could spike, according to the projections. Nearly 60 percent of women will have high blood pressure by 2050—up from 50 percent in 2020. And the rates of numerous cardiovascular conditions, such as coronary disease, heart failure, stroke and atrial fibrillation could all rise slightly, according to the study. By 2050, the prevalence of diabetes could increase by 10 percent, while that of obesity may increase by about 17 percent. Similar trends were observed in girls aged two to 19, with obesity predicted to increase from 19.6 percent to 32 percent by 2050.

“Cardiovascular disease is a life course disease. We can see risk factors start in childhood,” Joynt Maddox says. “I worry a lot about the increases that we’re projecting in young people, about setting people up for having heart problems when they’re in their 30s and 40s and 50s instead of their 60s and 70s and 80s.”

Amanda Montañez; Source: “Forecasting the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in Women in the United States through 2050: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association,” by Karen E. Joynt et al.,

Older women have a higher prevalence of disease, but cardiovascular risk factors are high and rising in younger groups. Those two trends could feed each other in a vicious cycle, Joynt Maddox explains. As women age, they might experience greater rates of cardiovascular disease associated with a prior heart or metabolic issue. People with a past history of stroke and heart attacks are more likely to die from heart failure years later.

Similar trends could be seen in men, Joynt Maddox says. “It’s not that women are uniquely experiencing the increase in obesity or high blood pressure, but there are additional layers on top of that,” she adds.

Part of the reason why women may be at particular risk could relate to the significant hormonal changes they experience throughout life, including during menstruation, pregnancy and menopause, Joynt Maddox says. Determining how these life events affect heart health will require more research, but these are “issues that we can definitely build upon,” Bairey Merz says.

Socioeconomic and demographic factors also affect outcomes. For example, Black women have the highest incidence of high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, which are all cardiovascular disease risk factors, and this is expected to still be the case in 2050. They could also see the gr

eatest jumps in heart failure and stroke, according to the new predictions.

“The double whammy is these intersectionalities—you’re Black or brown, and you live in a rural or underserved area, and you have absolutely no access to health care or insurance,” Bairey Merz says.

These racial health disparities are well documented, but the new forecast underscores the need for better prevention measures and health care policies, Joynt Maddox says. New glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1) drugs, for example, could help mitigate rates of cardiovascular disease and obesity. How much GLP-1 drugs will do this “is an enormous unanswered question,” says Joynt Maddox, adding that the data the projections are based on do not fully overlap with the rise in GLP-1 drugs. “But I’m optimistic that it’s going to be part of helping us bend the curve.”

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A Columbia University student was detained Thursday morning by immigration agents who misrepresented themselves by saying they were looking for a missing child to get access to a residential building, the university’s top administrator said.

Elmina Aghayeva, who is from Azerbaijan, was later released, but the school’s acting president, Claire Shipman, and others condemned the agents’ actions in the alleged 6 a.m. incident in an off-campus Columbia building.

“This was a frightening and fast-moving situation and utterly unacceptable for our students and staff,” Shipman said in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Aghayeva and said her student visa had been terminated in 2016 “for failing to attend classes.”

“The building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment,” the DHS statement said.

Aghayeva said Thursday afternoon in an Instagram story that she had been released and was on her way home. “I am safe and okay,” she wrote, adding that she was in “complete shock over what happened.”

The hours before she was released were marked by growing outrage and concern over how she was arrested.

Shipman said five federal agents entered the off-campus Columbia building “without any kind of warrant.”

“The agents gained entry by stating they were police searching for a missing child,” she said. “They made their way to the apartment of the student they were targeting with the same story.”

A representative from DHS said its agents wore badges around their necks and verbally identified themselves.

Shipman said the agents flashed a photo of the purported missing child, which was captured on security video, as part of the false story. She also said the agents did not show a university public safety officer any warrant.

“A public safety officer arrived, asked multiple times for a warrant, which was not produced, and asked for time to call his boss, which was not given,” Shipman said. “The agents took our student.”

Public officials were alarmed over the university officials’ allegation, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, who is in Washington, wrote on X that he spoke with President Donald Trump about concerns over the arrest.

“He has just informed me that she will be released imminently,” Mamdani wrote shortly before Aghayeva shared news of her release.

Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned the detention of the student and said “a rogue deportation agenda is operating with zero transparency and even less accountability.”

She also referred to Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind refugee who was found dead in Buffalo, New York, after authorities said Customs and Border Protection left him at a coffee shop.

“Yesterday, a blind father was released from federal custody and left alone on the street to find his way home. He never made it back to his family. This morning, ICE agents misled campus security and took a young woman from her college dorm without a judicial warrant,” Hochul said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., described the allegations as “unacceptable” on X. He said his office was working closely with Columbia and authorities on the matter.

“It is outrageous that ICE agents falsely represented themselves to arrest a Columbia graduate student by entering university-owned housing without a warrant,” he wrote.

Aghayeva is an international student with a visa, according to a statement her friends released through a faculty organization, the American Association of University Professors. She is in her senior year, majoring in neuroscience and political science.

The statement added that she was taken from her Columbia housing building on West 121st Street. 

Aghayeva’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition with the Southern District of New York on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News. It says that she entered the U.S. in or around 2016 on a visa and that no reason was given for her detention.

An attorney for Aghayeva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several student groups, including Columbia Student Apartheid Divest, called for an emergency rally “to protest the detention of an undergrad from a Columbia building.” The demonstration outside the university gates drew about 100 people, according to the college newspaper, the Columbia Spectator.

In the letter, Shipman reminded the campus community that law enforcement agents must have judicial warrants or judicial subpoenas to access nonpublic areas of the school. If law enforcement requests access, she said, students, faculty and staff members should ask the agents to wait and then contact the university’s public safety office.

“Do not allow them to enter or accept service of a warrant or subpoena,” Shipman urged.

“An administrative warrant is not sufficient” to access nonpublic areas of the campus, she added.

NBC News has reported that an internal ICE memo in May said agents are allowed to forcibly enter a home using an administrative warrant if a judge has issued a “final order of removal.” That is a departure from previous norms, in which a warrant signed by a judge or a magistrate was necessary for agents to forcibly enter homes.

The university said in a letter sent to the campus Thursday that it was deploying additional patrols and staffing to residential buildings.

Columbia residential staff members were instructed, in nonemergency situations, not to allow any law enforcement entry into its buildings without Columbia Public Safety present and guidance from the Office of the General Counsel.

Columbia University has become a political flash point over the past two years amid protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, high-profile ICE arrests, and criticism of the university from Trump himself.

The Trump administration ordered the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants last year after he accused the university of failing to act “in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

A letter was sent to the Columbia University trustees and the former interim president laying out conditions to restore its federal funding, which included a ban on masks on campus and comprehensive reform of its admissions “to confirm with federal law and policy.”

The university acquiesced to the demands last year to restore its grant funding. It also agreed to pay a $200 million settlement to the government to resolve allegations that it violated anti-discrimination laws.

According to the university, the agreement preserved “Columbia’s autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.”

Homeland Security agents also executed search warrants on two Columbia University residences last year, though no arrests were made at the time. The search came days after immigration authorities arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student at the time.

Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was released in June after three months in immigration detention following widespread protests and a legal battle to keep him in the U.S. Attorneys for Khalil argued that his detention was a targeted retaliation for his pro-Palestinian views and, therefore, unconstitutional.

Khalil’s status remains uncertain after an appeals court overturned a lower court ruling last month, saying he had to continue to move through the immigration court process before he could challenge whether the detention violated his rights.

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Elmina Aghayeva was detained at Columbia

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It’s my favorite “Star Trek” moment:

Shields are down, captain! We can’t take another hit!

In what seems like every movie or episode, whenever a federation starship is engaged in battle, its deflector shields are being raised or dropped or damaged by enemy fire to some oddly specific level (47 percent, say). It’s the stuff of high drama, when risk meets strategy to force a life-or-death decision. When shields are down, will the captain surrender, call for a shipwide evacuation, or launch an ingenious counterattack?

I do not claim full Trekkie status, but I’ve been thinking about those shields as I watch President Trump’s second term. Trump seems to have his own set of deflector shields: his cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whom he uses to absorb some of the blowback from his most contentious policies.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, is a shield for the Trump administration’s brutal, sometimes fatal, immigration enforcement. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is the face of the president’s efforts to exact prosecutorial vengeance upon his antagonists and to bypass such punishment for his allies. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, embodies the administration’s crusade against diversity programs and its faux tough-guy persona. And Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, is the administration’s “tariff dealmaker in chief,” as The New Yorker put it, the implementer of the president’s stubbornly unpopular trade policies.

When the shields are at reasonable strength, they can keep taking fire, and the ship of state continues flying. But when the shields are battered and begin to malfunction, the entire enterprise is exposed. And right now, a lot of Trump’s shields seem to be faltering at once.

Cosplaying with cowboy hats and bulletproof vests, Noem oversees and defends the excesses of ICE and the border patrol, personifying all that has gone wrong with the Department of Homeland Security. The Wall Street Journal recently published an embarrassing exposé, which featured Noem feuding with senior officials and obsessing over her television appearances; and this week, The Intercept reported that a story Noem has told repeatedly about an immigrant cannibal who began eating himself on a deportation flight was fabricated, citing federal law enforcement sources. The knives are out for Noem, not only from Democrats hoping to impeach her but from within the administration itself.

At the Justice Department, Bondi has done precisely as the president has demanded — investigating or indicting his political enemies, whether they are members of Congress, prosecutors, a former F.B.I. director, or another official who served in Trump’s first administration. Yet the saga of the Epstein files hovers over her. In a spectacularly combative House hearing this month, Bondi refused to turn and face victims of Epstein’s who were present and apologize to them, and she derided members of the Judiciary Committee as “a failed politician” in one case and a “washed-up loser lawyer” in another. While the Justice Department can’t hire enough prosecutors willing to pursue her partisan agenda, Bondi melts down on live television.

velations that surrounded his nomination, by the Signal-group-chat fiasco, and by his hectoring of top military officers regarding fitness and haircuts. But more recently, his missteps have escalated. First, with the strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean (including a potential war crime that Hegseth blamed on the “fog of war”), and second, with the Pentagon’s approval of the use of a laser weapon by border protection agents, which resulted in the brief shutdown of El Paso International Airport. The “warrior ethos” that Hegseth purports to represent is morphing into the incompetence that one would expect when a Fox News host is tasked with running the Pentagon.

And Lutnick, already charged with pursuing the Trump administration’s tariff policy — which 60 percent of Americans dislike — is now known to have misled the public about his connections to Epstein, which were more extensive than the secretary had previously stated. (It seems Lutnick visited Epstein’s island and did business with him after he had supposedly cut off ties.) When Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, calls this government “the Epstein administration,” this is the sort of thing he’s talking about.

During his first term, Trump was quick to eject top officials who displeased or embarrassed him. By this point in his first administration, the president had already moved on from the national security adviser; the F.B.I. director and deputy director; the White House chief of staff, press secretary and chief political strategist; and the secretary of health and human services. (Soon to go were his secretary of state, his top economic adviser, his secretary of veterans’ affairs, and another national security adviser.)

In the second term, by contrast, Trump has endured few major personnel losses. Mike Waltz was ousted as the national security adviser last year but received a consolation prize as the ambassador to the United Nations, while Elon Musk, who caused so much harm in his brief tenure as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, departed the unpaid post when his time as a so-called special government employee ran out.

So, why does Trump seem less willing to dismiss top officials and advisers this time around?

Part of it may be pique. After Trump gave up on Matt Gaetz, his initial choice for attorney general, who withdrew from consideration in response to allegations of sex trafficking and drug use, the president became reluctant to buckle again. Backtracking on other cabinet choices, even dubious picks such as Hegseth for the Pentagon or Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, might have signaled weakness, which we know this president cannot abide.

But there’s another explanation. When Trump cut loose senior officials during his first term, it was often because they espoused worldviews or priorities different from his own; in some cases, they obstructed his decisions or subscribed to norms he found useless and constraining. Remember Jeff Sessions, the attorney general whose unforgivable sin was to recuse himself from oversight of the Russia investigation, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel? Or Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state who repeatedly clashed with the White House over policy? “We were not really thinking the same,” Trump explained to reporters when he pushed out Tillerson.

The offenses of Trump’s second-term cabinet members tend to be ones of loyalty or sycophancy, rarely of independent thought. Whatever damage the secretaries inflict on their country or their reputations is done on the president’s orders and on his behalf. In Trump’s first term, sacrificing cabinet members meant firing them, or pushing them to resign. In the second term, it means keeping them in the job for as long as those shields retain even marginal power.

The cabinet secretaries understand their purpose. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state (and national security adviser and onetime national archivist), is among the more respected members of the administration; he was confirmed in the post by a unanimous Senate vote, as Trump recalled in his State of the Union address this week. “People like you,” the president marveled, to Rubio, perhaps thinking of the contrast with his own weak approval ratings. But Rubio knows the deal, which Trump made clear when he mused about retaking the Panama Canal during his address to Congress last year. “Good luck, Marco,” he said. “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”

Cabinet secretaries have often taken the fall for the president they serve. Jimmy Carter’s entire cabinet and senior White House staff offered to resign in July 1979, hoping to re-energize his troubled presidency. (Carter accepted a handful of resignations and reorganized the White House, but he still lost to Ronald Reagan the next year.) And after the Republican Party suffered “a thumping” in the 2006 midterm elections, as President George W. Bush memorably put it, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary overseeing the unpopular war in Iraq, quickly stepped down. (Stuff happens.)

Trump himself seems to be tiring of the cloying cabinet meetings, a staple of both terms, in which officials take turns gushing over their leader. (Personnel once meant policy; now it means flattery.) After he appeared to doze off at a recent gathering, Trump explained that it had gotten “pretty boring.” If affordability worries or violent immigration enforcement continue undercutting Trump’s standing, producing another midterm thumping for the Republicans this November, perhaps some of the cabinet secretaries will find the exits, no matter how fawningly they’ve praised Trump in public.

After all, it’s nice to have people to blame if anything goes wrong.

For the moment, though, Trump is sticking by his team, even those members who seem especially vulnerable. “Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, recently declared. “The president fully supports the secretary.” And at Homeland Security, a top spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, is leaving, but not yet Noem herself, no matter that the department is so toxic on Capitol Hill that Democrats have blocked its funding.

The president can afford to dangle these battered shields by his side a little longer because he still has others at his disposal: a subservient congressional majority; a Supreme Court that, no matter its ruling on tariffs or on the deployment of National Guard troops in U.S. cities, still granted him “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official acts; and a vice president who will remain a trolling Trump loyalist as long as he thinks it will get him the Republican nomination in 2028.

For all the attention devoted to Trump’s deteriorating popularity, his public standing may not matter that much to him. Trump knows he is not going to appear on a ballot again; whatever the price for the incompetence of his cabinet or the venality of his administration, he will not be the one to pay it.

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Photo illustration by The New York Times; source photographs by Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images

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Hmmmm … We are falling behind the world in everything because of this Administration!

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The future of renewable energy might be in the sky. Researchers in China have reportedly tested a new, gravity-defying wind turbine system that they say could generate power from the airspace above cities.

The turbine is called the S2000 Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System, or SAWES. Held up by what is essentially a helium blimp, the machine reportedly generated 385 kilowatts of electricity from 2,000 meters (more than 6,500 feet) above the city of Yibin in China’s province of Sichuan, according to a recent Euronews report.

You can see it in action in the video below.

“Traditional wind turbines operate by rotating their blades when wind strikes them, thereby generating electricity,” said Weng Hanke, co-founder and chief technology officer of the turbine’s maker, Beijing Linyi Yunchuan Energy Technology, to Euronews. “This generator functions similarly, except that power generation occurs not at ground level but in the air.” As the blades spin, cables carry electricity to the ground.

Researchers reportedly conducted similar tests last September, and the machine is still a prototype. Although China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the country is also the global leader in renewable energy, especially wind and solar.

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Oseguera, better known as “El Mencho”, died in custody on Sunday, shortly after being captured amid a bloody firefight in Jalisco.

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Members of the Sinaloa cartel have split into rival factions engaged in a deadly war, Darren Conway/BBC

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What We’re Covering Today

• Immigration: A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday found that the Trump administration’s policy of summarily deporting immigrants to nations other than their home countries is unlawful. The judge stayed his ruling for 15 days to allow the administration to appeal, but it was nonetheless a repudiation of an aggressive deportation policy that sent immigrants to countries where they have no ties, including Eswatini, Rwanda, and Ghana.

• Surgeon General: Dr. Casey Means, the wellness influencer and entrepreneur nominated by President Trump for surgeon general, dodged questions on whether she believed vaccines cause autism at her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. She also deflected questions about birth control, her finance,s and other topics while making the case that the country was suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases.

• State of the Union: Mr. Trump used much of his State of the Union address on Tuesday to berate Democrats, offering few new policy proposals while portraying the country as “winning” under his leadership. In the Democrats’ formal rebuttal, Gov. Abigail Spanberger accused Mr. Trump of lying about the economy, while other Democrats boycotted the speech.  

The third-country deportations ruling repudiates a key Homeland Security Department policy.

A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday found that the Trump administration’s policy of summarily deporting immigrants to so-called third countries — nations other than their countries of origin — is unlawful.

In an 81-page ruling, Judge Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote that the government must first try to deport detained immigrants to their home countries — or to countries designated by an immigration judge when the immigrants were ordered removed from the country. After that process, immigration detainees must be given “meaningful notice” before being deported to another country, to allow them the opportunity to raise any fears they have that they might be persecuted or tortured there.

Senate Democrats block D.H.S. funding bill because it has no new curbs on immigration enforcement.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a spending bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that any such measure must include new curbs on immigration enforcement that Republicans have so far rejected.

The 50-to-45 vote all but ensured that federal funding for the department would remain halted for a second week as the stalemate between Democrats and Republicans over new restrictions on immigration agents stretches on. The legislation, which would fund the agency through September, contained modest guardrails that fell well short of Democrats’ demands. It stalled anew after failing to draw the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, with nearly all Democrats opposed, just hours before President Trump was set to address Congress. 

The nominee for surgeon general sidesteps questions about vaccines at a Senate hearing.

Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, told senators on Wednesday that “anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been part of my message,” as she deflected questions about birth control, pesticides, vaccines and her finances.

Testifying before the Senate Health Committee, Dr. Means, a wellness influencer, author and leader in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, said Americans were suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases linked to ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, and the stressed, sedentary nature of modern life.

Over more than two hours before the Senate health committee, Dr. Casey Means laid out a bleak picture of health in the United States, tying rising rates of chronic diseases to the foods Americans eat, how little we move, the medications we take and the toxic chemicals around us. While Means called for a “great national healing” during her confirmation hearing for surgeon general, she repeatedly dodged questions on vaccines, including from Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican who is a doctor and a proponent of vaccines.

Means said that she believed vaccines were life-saving and important but also that parents and patients should have autonomy and rely on thorough discussions with their doctors. She also faced numerous questions about the supplements and wellness products she has previously promoted in her newsletter.

The Senate’s confirmation hearing for Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, has ended. Dr. Casey Means did not answer directly when Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Lousiana, asked if universal hepatitis B vaccination was an important goal. She said the vaccine was life-saving but that parents should have “autonomy.” She said children should be immunized “at some point in their youth.” Cassidy, a medical doctor and liver specialist, has previously spoken out strongly in support of the vaccine.Dr. Means said she had “significant concerns” about pesticides like glyphosate, and called for them to be studied more robustly. She has previously called moving away from industrial agriculture practices that use toxic pesticides the single most important strategy for solving health and environmental issues. She has also called the use of pesticides a “slow-motion extinction event.”Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, pressed Means about past comments she had made on the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. Means said the vaccine was “effective” and “very important,” but that parents should make a shared decision with doctors.

Democrats counter Trump after his combative State of the Union speech.

President Trump used much of his nearly two-hour State of the Union address on Tuesday night to berate and taunt Democrats, who responded by accusing the president of lying about the economy and ignoring voters’ concerns.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump introduced few new policies and instead appeared to relish the theatrics of the moment. He attacked Democrats as “crazy” for not standing for or applauding his priorities, especially on crime, immigration and the economy.

Ilhan Omar condemns arrest of her guest at State of the Union.

Representative Ilhan Omar on Wednesday condemned the arrest of a guest she brought to the State of the Union, saying that being charged with a crime for standing up in the gallery during the president’s address “sends a chilling message about the state of our democracy.”

Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who was dragged from her vehicle after an ICE agent shattered its window during President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, attended the president’s speech on Tuesday night at the invitation of Ms. Omar. As Mr. Trump was speaking, Ms. Rahman was seen being escorted from the gallery above the House floor by Capitol Police officers. She could be heard shouting for someone to call Ms. Omar, and that all she had done was stand up.

Trump’s speech gets a mixed reaction around the world.

President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday has prompted a variety of reactions in the global news media.

Canada’s public broadcaster called it a “relatively focused” speech by the president’s standards, with “one angry detour” about immigration. The British Broadcasting Corporation said it was “made-for-the-cameras” moment, while The Guardian deemed it Mr. Trump’s “most inconsequential” address yet. The South China Morning Post noticed he did not mention Beijing.

Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, released a statement condemning the arrest of one of her guests at last night’s State of the Union speech: Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who had been dragged from her car after an ICE agent shattered her car’s window during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. In an interview with “Democracy Now,” Rahman said that the sergeant of arms told her she was arrested because she had stood up during the speech.

Rahman “stood up silently in the gallery during the president’s speech for a short period of time, part of which other guests were also standing,” Omar said. “For that, she was forcibly removed, despite warning officers about her injured shoulders and ultimately charged with ‘Unlawful Conduct.’”

“The heavy-handed response to a peaceful guest sends a chilling message about the state of our democracy,” Omar said, calling for a full explanation.

President Trump insulted and criticized Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, two Muslim Democrats who heckled him during his State of the Union address, suggesting in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday that that America “should send them back from where they came.”

Trump has a history of making such nativist attacks, which lawmakers have long criticized as deploying racist tropes, against both women, left-leaning lawmakers, who were the first two Muslim women ever elected to Congress. Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, was born in Detroit. Omar, a frequent target of the president, is from Somalia. Both are American citizens.

Seven voters react to Trump’s address.

During President Trump’s State of the Union address, many medals were given out. There was taunting of Democrats, a few of whom shouted right back.

But in a midterm election year, with his polls numbers slipping, Mr. Trump spent much of the speech trying to make the case that his second term was “a turnaround for the ages.”

Vance says Trump administration will withhold over $250 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota.

Trump administration officials announced on Wednesday that the federal government would withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota, the latest effort by the federal government to pull funding from Democratic-led states as President Trump rails against a major welfare fraud scandal there.

Federal judges have blocked most of the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back funds from states like Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. The states have decried the cuts as politically motivated, adding that they would harm hundreds of thousands of people. The Trump administration has pointed to allegations of fraud to justify the cuts.

Patel ousts F.B.I. personnel tied to the inquiry into Trump’s retention of classified records.

About 10 F.B.I. employees, some veteran agents, were dismissed this week for their work on the investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida, according to five people with knowledge of the move.

The firings are part of a rolling barrage of retribution aimed at those who worked on the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump after his first term in office. They came hours after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that as part of the documents inquiry, the bureau had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff.

A federal prosecutor found to be in civil contempt of court by a judge in Minnesota is now appealing that ruling, according to court filings. Matthew Isihara, a military judge advocate on temporary assignment to the Justice Department, was found in contempt by Judge Laura M. Provinzino last week after D.H.S. released an immigration detainee hundreds of miles away from home, and without his identification papers, contrary to the judge’s order. Because his papers were returned promptly by FedEx after the contempt ruling, Isihara was able to avoid a $500-a-day fine, but the legal dispute over his conduct will now continue. The notice filed Wednesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit says Isihara is appealing “in his individual capacity,” and is signed by Daniel N. Rosen, the district’s U.S. attorney. The appeal comes as dozens of judges across the country threaten to hold administration lawyers in contempt for ignoring their orders and missing filing deadlines in cases where immigrants are challenging the legality of their detention. 

About 10 F.B.I. employees, some of them veteran agents, have been dismissed in connection with their work on the federal investigation into President Trump’s improper retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his residence and resort in Florida, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The dismissals came on the same day Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that the F.B.I. had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff, when they were private citizens in 2022 and 2023 as part of the documents investigation.

Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration would withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota, the latest effort by the federal government to pull funding from Democratic states. Federal judges have blocked most of those actions, including two pots of funds of more than $10 billion distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Like the previous safety net cuts, administration officials justified the withheld funds by pointing to a major welfare fraud scandal that has rocked Minnesota. President Trump has alleged, without evidence, that similar large fraud schemes are playing out elsewhere in Minnesota and other Democratic states. The president has also, improbably, claimed that there is so much fraud that he would be able to balance the federal budget once he eliminated such waste — a mathematically impossible feat, given the amount of funding involved compared with the size of the deficit.

The Senate voted along party lines to fill the seat of an air safety official ousted by Trump.

The Senate on Wednesday voted along party lines to confirm John DeLeeuw to the National Transportation Safety Board, filling an opening that President Trump created when he fired the board’s vice chair, who is suing to get his job back.

The debate over the selection of Mr. DeLeeuw, a longtime aviator and executive for American Airlines, did not center on his qualifications. The 50-to-45 vote, in which all Republicans voted to confirm, served as more of a referendum on whether Mr. Trump has power to fire Senate-confirmed federal officials — a question being considered by the Supreme Court.

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said Wednesday that he would most likely force a vote next week on a measure to curb President Trump’s power to order an attack on Iran. “The president made no real case last night as to why we should be in a war with Iran,” Kaine said on Capitol Hill. “We should not send our sons and daughters into another war in the Middle East.”

Kaine conceded that the Republican majority could kill the bill, as they did with a similar resolution on Venezuela last month. But with the president ordering a build up of U.S. military force in the region, he said he intended to make sure “everybody is going to be on the record.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he spoke with Trump over the phone on Wednesday, along with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, about the peace talks set to take place in Geneva on Thursday. Zelensky said he thanked Trump for a program that allows European allies to buy U.S. air defense missiles for Ukraine, which Trump touted during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “This winter has been the most difficult one for Ukraine, but the missiles for air defense systems that we purchase from the U.S. are helping us get through all these challenges and protect lives,” Zelensky said in a statement. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Wednesday that Iran should take President Trump’s threats to use military action “seriously,” saying the president had shown a “willingness” to use force if diplomatic efforts fail to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. His comment echoed President Trump’s State of the Union address, in which he said that his “preference” was to take the path of diplomacy but did not explain why he had amassed the largest amount of military firepower in the Middle East since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Negotiators for both the United States and Iran are set to hold indirect talks in Geneva on the United States imposed new sanctions on Wednesday on more than 30 entities, individuals, and vessels that it said were linked to Iran’s weapons procurement networks and the shadow fleet surreptitiously transporting Iranian oil to foreign markets. The Treasury Department will continue to apply “maximum pressure on Iran to target the regime’s weapons capabilities and support for terrorism,” Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said on Wednesday that she had an eight-minute phone call with President Trump on Monday after a military operation in the state of Jalisco during which the cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, was killed. The kiling unleashed retaliatory violence by the cartel in several states.

She said that Trump asked what was happening in Mexico. “I told him how the operation had gone, that we had received intelligence support from the U.S. government, that the coordination was going very well, and that was it,” Sheinbaum said. This contrasts with Trump’s remarks on Tuesday night during his State of the Union address, when he appeared to take credit for the operation.

To deal with rising electric bills, Trump says tech companies will pay.

In a nod to voter frustration over rising electricity prices, President Trump on Tuesday said he was negotiating pledges from major tech companies to pay a greater share of the energy costs associated with new data centers.

Silicon Valley is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build power-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence as demand for electricity is increasing across the United States. That has led to widespread fears that the A.I. boom could cause utility bills to spike for ordinary households.

The United States sent a group of F-22 Raptor jets to Israel on Tuesday, a U.S. official and a person familiar with the deployment said. The move continued the U.S. military buildup in the Middle East and came two days before the next round of negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program was expected.

Flight tracking data and videos show what appears to be the first known deployment of this type of aircraft, one of the most advanced U.S. fighter jets, during the escalating tensions with Iran. Videos and photos captured by plane spotters show a dozen F-22s taking off from their temporary station in Britain.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• State of the Union: In the longest such address in U.S. history, President Trump cast Democrats as villains and insisted he had overseen a “turnaround for the ages,” even as voters lost confidence in his handling of the economy. Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia gave the Democratic rebuttal. Here are six takeaways from the night.

• Surgeon General Nominee: Dr. Casey Means told senators in her confirmation hearing that “anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been part of my message,” as she deflected questions about birth control, pesticides, vaccines, and her finances.

• Bureau of Land Management: An unusual coalition of hunters, veterans, and environmental activists is opposing Steve Pearce, Trump’s choice to lead the

• bureau, citing concerns about actions he had taken as a lawmaker to try to sell public lands to private interests.

• Mideast Military Buildup: The United States sent a group of F-22 Raptor jets to Israel, a U.S. official and a person familiar with the deployment said, a continuation buildup of forces in the region that came two days before another round of negotiations with Iran.

• Kash Patel: The F.B.I. director’s trip to Italy — culminating in a celebratory beer swig with the U.S. hockey team at the Milan Olympics — included several hours of work meetings, a handful of meet-and-greets, hours of downtime, private meals, and “cultural activities,” according to an internal schedule obtained by The Times. The taxpayer-funded visit reignited the firestorm over use of government resources.

• Homeland Security Funding: Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that any such measure must include new curbs on immigration enforcement that Republicans have so far rejected. The vote all but ensured that federal funding for the department would remain halted for a second week.

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A group of Middle Eastern and Asian migrants deported by the U.S. government at a shelter in Panama last year. Credit…Nathalia Angarita for The New York Times

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