Want to improve your health on a truly deep level? The practice of yoga—including pranayama (breath control) and meditation—has been proven to improve the function of the entire nervous system, which controls all of your internal functions and physical movements. Yoga exerts this power by calming down the two dueling parts of the nervous system: sympathetic and parasympathetic. The first is famous for the “fight-or-flight” response, which causes the body to spring into action and prepare for physical and mental activity. The second causes the “rest-and-digest” response, a general slowdown in the body’s functions in order to conserve energy. Advertisement These two sides originate in two different locations within the central nervous system. Parasympathetic nerves emerge in the brain and brainstem, and sympathetic nerves arise from the spinal cord. The most powerful, natural way to modulate both of these is through respiration—pranayama, or breathing, in other words. Read More: Why Do I Keep Having Recurring Dreams? Yoga imparts a calming effect because it basically undoes the sympathetic nervous system’s quick, involuntary response to danger or stressful situations. A regular yoga practice has been shown to improve digestion; strengthen the immune system; and reduce the risk of hypertension, asthma, and stress-induced psychological disorders like anxiety. It does this, practitioners have long theorized, through a unique blend of science and spirituality.

If the neurologist Dr. Daniel Lesley sees 10 patients a day, at least half ask him the same question: Are the brain lapses they’re experiencing a normal part of aging? Or should they be worried? “People have an absolute terror of losing their memory and thinking they're losing themselves,” says Lesley, who works at Remo Health, a virtual dementia care company. “They don't know what’s normal, what's potentially a sign of something bad, and what's reversible.” Advertisement Just like every other organ in the body, the brain changes as you get older. Occasional, subtle memory problems—like not remembering where you parked at Costco—are usually no big deal. “Part of normal aging is paying less attention to details, and more attention to patterns and dynamics," Lesley says. “It may also become more difficult to access things quickly,” like names and certain words. When sporadic trouble becomes a regular occurrence, however, and other memory issues pop up—like repeating questions or missing appointments—it’s time for an evaluation. If you’re not sure, ask a spouse, friend, or adult child, suggests Dr. Zaldy S. Tan, director of the memory and healthy aging program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Have a conversation: ‘Have you noticed me repeating anything or asking the same questions? Have you noticed me misplacing things more often?’ Because we’re not necessarily the best judge of our memory—we don’t remember what we forget,” he says.

President Donald Trump emerges through a pair of handsome wooden doors on the third floor of the White House. On his way down the wide, carpeted staircase, he passes portraits of his predecessors. Nixon is opposite the landing outside the residence. Two flights down, he has swapped the placement of Clinton and Lincoln, moving a massive painting of the latter into the main entrance hall of the mansion. “Lincoln is Lincoln, in all fairness,” he explains. “And I gave Clinton a good space.” But it’s the portrait around the corner that Trump wants to show off. It’s a giant painting of a photograph—that photograph, the famous image of Trump, his fist raised, blood trickling down his face, after the attempt on his life last July at a rally in Butler, Pa. It hangs across the foyer from a portrait of Obama, in tacit competition. When they bring tours in, everyone wants to look at this one, Trump says, gesturing to the painting of himself, in technicolor defiance. “100 to 1, they prefer that,” he says. “It’s incredible.” Making his way out to the Rose Garden, he walks up the inclined colonnade toward the Oval Office, describing the other alterations to the decor, both inside and out. His imprint on his workspace is apparent. The molding and mantels have gold accents now, and he has filled the walls with portraits of other presidents in gilded frames. He has hung an early copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a set of blue curtains. The box with a red button that allows Trump to summon Diet Cokes is back in its place on the Resolute desk, behind which stands a new battalion of flags, including one for the U.S. Space Force, the military branch he established. A map of the “Gulf of America,” as Trump has rechristened the Gulf of Mexico, was propped on a stand nearby. If Trump is making cosmetic changes to the White House, his effect on the presidency goes much deeper. The first 100 days of his second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history, a blitz of power grabs, strategic shifts, and direct attacks that have left opponents, global counterparts, and even many supporters stunned. Trump has launched a battery of orders and memoranda that have hobbled entire government agencies and departments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force, seize control of the Panama Canal, and annex Canada. Weaponizing his control of the Justice Department, he has ordered investigations of political enemies. He has gutted much of the civil service, removing more than a hundred thousand federal workers. He has gone to war with institutions across American life: universities, media outlets, law firms, museums. He pardoned or gave a commutation to every single defendant charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, including those convicted of violent acts and seditious conspiracy. Seeking to remake the global economy, he triggered a trade war by unleashing a sweeping array of tariffs that sent markets plummeting. Embarking on his promised program of mass deportation, he has mobilized agencies across government, from the IRS to the Postal Service, as part of the effort to find, detain, and expel immigrants. He has shipped some of them to foreign countries without due process, citing a wartime provision from the 18th century. His Administration has snatched foreign students off the streets and stripped their visas for engaging in speech he dislikes. He has threatened to send Americans to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Says one senior Administration official: “Our success depends on his ability to shock you.” What shocks constitutional scholars and civil libertarians is the power Trump is attempting to amass and the impunity with which he is wielding it. Trump has claimed Congress’s constitutional authority over spending and foreign trade, citing a loosely defined emergency. He has asserted control over independent agencies and ignored post-Watergate rules designed to prevent political meddling in law enforcement and investigations. When lower courts have ordered him to slow or reverse potentially illegal moves, he has at times ignored or publicly ridiculed them. In one case, he defied a Supreme Court order. Issuing a ruling in that fight, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee and arguably the most influential conservative jurist outside the high court, said the Administration’s behavior threatens to “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.” In an hour-long interview with TIME on April 22, Trump cast the first three months of his term as an unbridled success. “What I’m doing is exactly what I’ve campaigned on,” he says. Which is true, in part. From deportations and tariffs to remaking America’s alliances and attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Donald John Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, is carrying out pledges to radically reshape America and its role in the world. He didn’t invent most of the problems he is aggressively going after, and supporters say he is doing more than predecessors from both parties to fix them. America’s immigration system has been broken for decades; Trump’s moves have slowed illegal border crossings to a trickle. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. strategists bemoaned military “free-riders” in Europe and East Asia; Trump has triggered previously unimaginable moves by Germany and Japan to spend more on their own, and their neighbors’, collective defense. China used its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 to launch a multidecade attack on those who sought to do business with them; Trump’s latest tariffs are the most aggressive effort to fight back. “I have solved more problems in the world without asking for or getting credit,” he says. Trump has benefited from an enfeebled Democratic Party and compliant congressional Republicans who have abdicated legislative powers and long-held beliefs, whether out of cowardice or a desire to ride his coattails. There has been little meaningful or sustained backlash from the public. The civil-society leaders and corporate titans with the most political capital have largely acquiesced to Trump’s rule, choosing supplicancy over solidarity. The capitulation has only emboldened him. It’s possible that Trump, 100 days in, is at the peak of his power. A resistance—if not one that resembles the first-term Resistance—is stirring to life. Trump’s protectionist policies threaten a recession of his own making; businesses big and small face the imminent threat of closure as they cut workers, close production lines, and try to stay afloat in the face of disruptions to supply chains and revenue of a scale not seen since the pandemic. Universities have found greater courage in the face of Trump’s threats to their multibillion-dollar research budgets. Communities that rely on immigrant labor have bristled at the uptick in deportations. With consumer confidence at its lowest level in three years and inflation expected to climb as a consequence of the trade war, even meek Republicans have raised complaints about the impact of some of Trump’s moves on their political future. Polling finds that a larger share of Americans now live in fear of their government and Trump’s approval rating has slipped to 40%, according to a Pew survey, lower at this early stage in his term than that of any other recent President.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Don’t look now, but Donald Trump is in some of the worst polling territory of his time in power. And that’s saying something, as he’s never been on terribly firm ground. For most of his first term, Trump leaned heavily on his solid footing as a steward of the economy and defender of the border to offset his erratic day-to-day antics. But his support on those twin policy pillars are showing signs of weakening in a series of new polls pegged to his first 100 days back in power. In fact, they’re dragging him down as he adopts more extreme policies. All of the latest polls show Trump doing terribly on his handling of the economy. Reuters, in fact, found Trump at his lowest marks for the economy ever—just 37% approval. On immigration, Trump’s polling isn’t quite as dire, but he’s just about completely erased his edge amid a deportation spree that's included U.S. citizens and others in the country legally. His unfavorable numbers have been on a steady climb since he came back to the Oval Office, reaching as of Thursday 52% in a New York Times aggregate analysis. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush were all faring better at this point in their terms. And Trump 2.0 takes little solace in the fact he’s still doing better than Trump 1.0 was faring eight years ago at this point in the presidency. (That excludes a brutal Fox News poll, released Wednesday, that has him under his first-term numbers by a single point, but still within the margin of error.) In this century, no U.S. President’s polling has fallen off as sharply as Trump’s, either. And it’s not like he had much padding there, either; he started his second term with the second-worst numbers of any President in the modern era, again only saved by his first time coming to Washington. You have to go back all the way to 1953 to find a first-time President with worse numbers. (For those who cannot tick through the White House occupant list, that would be first-time politician Dwight D. Eisenhower.) The latest polling for The Economist and YouGov give Trump an approval rating of negative 13 points—a three-point hit from just a week ago. (At this point in his presidency, Biden was up 11 points.) Drilling down into the latest polling from Pew, Trump is in negative territory in every single demographic group save two: Republicans and those people who voted for him. Men, women, persons of color, college educated and not—they all have net negative views of him. On exactly zero issues is he in net-positive territory. Not immigration. Not trade. Not public health. Not the economy. Not foreign policy or tax policy. There’s no single answer why voters have started to sour on Trump, but it’s impossible to set aside the economy. Trump’s tariff tiff with friend and foe alike has left markets rattled. His escalating trade war is giving Wall Street major buyers’ remorse. His mass deportations have left employers scrambling for low-cost labor and courts jammed with cases. His gutting of government—and lurching reboots—does little to project steadiness, either. Gallup’s polling, also new this week, finds the country exhibiting the worst economic confidence since 2001 when it started asking the question. What started as a net-12 point advantage on the economy for Trump at the start of his term three months ago has become a 12-point deficit—a massive shift marking about a quarter of the electorate, according to the Economist/ YouGov data. It’s a similar rot in the same poll’s question on immigration. What started as an 11-point net positive there has since become a net-negative prospect of 5 points in that Economist/ YouGov survey. In the new Pew data, immigration ranked as the most liked thing Trump has done so far, ranking up there with about 20% of all Americans. It’s the lone area where Trump is above water, although the Fox numbers hint at trouble, with just 47% giving him good marks on that topic, and 48% disapproving. But when asked what they like the least about his work so far, his approach to governing is equally as strong, with 22% of adults telling Pew it’s their biggest criticism of time back in power. The fading shine of Trump is far from a salve for the wound he’s gashing on Washington, but it does give hope for Democrats, who have been open about their lack of strategy for pushing back on just about any of his moves undermining the rule of law, the economy, or even the government he leads. Politically independent voters—the bread and butter of elections—have been the biggest crack in Trump’s coalition: in January, according to Quinnipiac polling, 46% of indie voters said they disapproved of Trump; today, that number stands at 58%. A 12-point swing with independents is the entire ballgame, and should give Republicans a reason to reconsider if Trump’s halo is enough to save them when they face voters next year. Among Republicans, there are also signs of trouble. The Fox poll asked GOP voters about their prospects for this second term, and 75% of the group said they were “encouraged” about the next four years. Good, sure. But recall that 84% of those partisans said the same when asked that question at this point during Trump’s first term. If this trend continues, there might be reason for the groundskeepers at the Capitol to ready the Speaker’s suite for a new occupant, especially given Democrats’ strong fundraising so far this cycle. Republicans currently have a tiny seven-seat majority in that chamber. So far, GOP lawmakers have shown deference to the belief only Trump could protect them from a loss in the next primary. These latest numbers show he may actually be piling on the pain.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday offered rare criticism of Vladimir Putin, urging the Russian leader to “STOP!” after a deadly barrage of attacks on Kyiv, Ukraine's capital. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying.” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!” Russia struck Kyiv with an hourslong barrage of missiles and drones. At least 12 people were killed and 90 were injured in the deadliest assault on the city since last July. Trump’s frustration is growing as a U.S.-led effort to get a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia has not made progress. The comments about Putin came after Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday and accused him of prolonging the “killing field” by refusing to surrender the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula as part of a possible deal. Russia illegally annexed that area in 2014. With his assertion that Putin demonstrated “very bad timing" with the massive attack, Trump appeared to suggest that the Russian leader was doing himself no favors toward achieving the Kremlin's demand that any peace agreement include Russia keeping control of Crimea as well as Ukrainian territory in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions it has seized since invading in February 2022. Later Thursday during an Oval Office meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump said that Crimea was taken from Ukraine without a fight. He also noted that annexation of the Black Sea peninsula happened under President Barack Obama's watch. Asked what Putin is doing now to help forge a peace deal, Trump responded, “stopping taking the whole country, pretty big concession.” But the notion is one that Ukraine and much of Europe have fiercely pushed back against, arguing that Russia pausing a land grab is hardly a concession. Zelensky has repeated many times that recognizing occupied territory as Russia's is a red line for Ukraine. He noted Thursday that Ukraine had agreed to a U.S. ceasefire proposal 44 days ago as a first step to a negotiated peace, but that Moscow's attacks had continued. Trump’s criticism of Putin is notable because Trump has repeatedly said Russia is more willing than Ukraine to get a deal done. “I didn’t like last night,” Trump said of Russia’s massive attack on Kyiv. “I wasn’t happy with it.” In his dealings with Zelensky and Putin, Trump has focused on which leader has leverage. Putin has “the cards” and Zelensky does not, Trump has said repeatedly. At the same time, the new Republican administration has taken steps toward a more cooperative line with Putin, for whom Trump has long shown admiration. Trump in his meeting with Norway's Gahr Støre discussed the war in Ukraine, U.S. tariffs and other issues. Norway, a member of NATO and strong supporter of Ukraine, shares a roughly 123-mile (198-kilometer) border with Russia. Gahr Støre said “both parties have to know that they have to deliver." He also suggested that Trump is pushing the two sides to come to an agreement. “To move towards an end of this war, U.S engagement is critical, and President Trump made that possible," he said. "That is clear” Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron said Putin should “stop lying” when he claims to want “peace” while continuing to bomb Ukraine. “There is only one answer we are waiting for: Does President Putin agree to an unconditional ceasefire?” said Macron during a visit to Madagascar. Macron added that “the Americans’ anger should focus on just one person: President Putin.” The French Foreign Ministry also offered measured pushback on Trump's criticism of Zelensky over the Ukrainian's stance on Crimea. During talks last week in Paris, U.S. officials presented a proposal that included allowing Russia to keep control of occupied Ukrainian territory as part of a deal, according to a European official familiar with the matter. The proposal was discussed again Wednesday during talks with U.S., European, and Ukrainian officials. “The principle of Ukraine’s territorial integrity is not something that can be negotiated,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine said. “This was the position taken last week and reiterated yesterday in London in a meeting of a similar format.” Asked whether France agreed with Trump’s comments that Ukraine’s position was to blame for prolonging the war, Lemoine said Ukrainians showed they are open to negotiations while Russia continues its strikes. “We rather have the impression that it is the Russians who are slowing down the discussions,” he said. The White House announced Tuesday that Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, would visit Moscow this week for a new round of talks with Putin about the war. It would be their fourth meeting since Trump took office in January. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met on Thursday with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who also held talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's national security adviser, Michael Waltz. Leaders from the 32-member alliance are set to meet in the Netherlands in two months. Trump has pushed them to significantly step up defense spending. In 2023, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second year, they agreed that all allies should spend at least 2% of gross domestic product on their military budgets. Estimates in NATO's annual report released Thursday showed that 22 allies had reached that goal last year, compared with a previous forecast of 23. “But clearly with 2%, we cannot defend NATO territory,” Rutte told reporters at the White House following the meeting. “It has to be considerably higher.” —Petrequin reported from Paris. Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. President Donald Trump knows exactly who to blame for the tanking economy: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has not acceded to Trump’s whims to lower interest rates to goose the economy. For just about everyone else—including Jay “Mr. Too Late” Powell, in Trump’s latest nickname of contempt—the culprit is just as clear: Trump himself, who has threatened, implemented, suspended, swapped, and escalated tariffs like so many wallpaper swatches. The White House is treating the debate as if it is not quite so one-sided, while also trying to act as if every new statement from Trump or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent represents a coherent policy. For a President obsessed with the stock market, the rebuke from investors is particularly stinging. Since Trump took office, stocks have tanked, the bond market has gone wobbly, and the dollar is weaker. Just Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund revised its forecast, upping the odds of a recession to 37% from its previous marker of 25%. That’s more conservative than the assessment of Americans—42% of whom think the economy is already in recession or economic depression, according to Gallup’s latest polling. This all helps explain why Trump in the last 36 hours seems to have climbed down from a cliff of his own making—by saying he has “no intention” of firing Powell, a few days after posting “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” (To be clear: whether a President can depose the head of the Fed is completely untested. Markets are unequivocally terrified of Trump even trying to do so.) Meanwhile, Bessent told a closed-door speech to JPMorgan Chase that he expects a de-escalation of the trade war with China, where U.S. policy is adding 145% to imports and China is tacking on an extra 125%. “Neither side thinks the status quo is sustainable,” Bessent said in Tuesday remarks that leaked as expected and sent markets surging. (The Bessent Effect is real, as Bloomberg notes; on days when he’s headlining the economy, markets move upward.) Here’s the thing: Investors crave certainty. That’s why the United States is the far-and-away top destination for foreign direct investment, logging more than $5 trillion in holdings from non-Americans. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 10 cents of every FDI dollar invested globally, according to IMF data. On Tuesday, Wall Street rallied on Trump’s and Bessent’s remarks, but you talk to anyone in Washington in touch with major investors and it’s clear no one is taking those statements as reliable for more than a few days. For now, things look to continue racing in the wrong direction. The IMF forecast downgraded U.S. economic growth to a meager 1.8% this year, down from an expected 2.7%. (In Biden’s final calendar year in office, the economy grew by 2.8%.) Trump, too, seemed to realize things are going poorly, but he continues to blame Powell, who could lower borrowing rates and juice the flagging economy. Such a move, though, risks nudging inflation, which is a persistent worry. Core inflation—which excludes highly volatile food and energy prices—is at its lowest rate since March 2021. On Wednesday, Bessent used a gathering on the sidelines of an IMF event in Washington to pay lip-service to Trump’s unique brand of grievance, while still trying to calm markets. “The IMF was once unwavering in its mission of promoting global monetary cooperation and financial stability. Now it devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues,” Bessent said. He also blamed “mission creep” for not doing more to keep the global economy in equilibrium—often to the United States’ advantage. In a follow-up meeting with financial reporters, Bessent said de-escalation with China is a priority but the two countries’ leaders are not in talks, and a deal cannot be negotiated with underlings. He also hinted that Trump’s team would see it as a victory if a general framework comes into place without any hard agreement. The White House continues to sell all this as a hiccup that won’t stop the ushering in of a new golden age of manufacturing as firms realize they’d rather invest in factories here than pay the import taxes. The real culprit, in the West Wing’s mind, remains Powell. Or at least he is a viable place to offload the blame. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday told reporters that the Fed was needlessly keeping rates steady “in the name of politics, rather in the name of what’s right for the American economy.” Among those who watch the Fed and the billions of dollars it moves on Wall Street, the story the White House is telling doesn’t match reality. And as investors brace for the bill to come due from Trump’s standoff with, well, the world, the Administration's constant messaging shifts are beginning to drown out the messages themselves.

President Trump was dealt a setback in his plans for American public education, as three federal judges issued separate rulings on Thursday pausing his ability to withhold funds from schools with diversity and equity initiatives. The rulings block the administration, at least for now, from carrying out efforts to cut off billions of dollars that pay for teachers, counselors and academic programs in schools that serve low-income children. Two of the judges who issued the decisions were appointed by Mr. Trump. A third was appointed by President Barack Obama. The cases were brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others. In one of the cases, Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the Federal District Court in New Hampshire said that the administration had not provided an adequately detailed definition of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She also said the policy threatened to restrict free speech in the classroom, while overstepping the executive branch’s legal authority over local schools. The loss of federal funding “would cripple the operations of many educational institutions,” wrote Judge McCafferty, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The three rulings followed a demand earlier this month by the Trump administration that all 50 state education agencies attest in writing that their schools do not use certain D.E.I. practices. Otherwise, they would risk losing billions in Title I money, which supports low-income students. The deadline for returning that document was Thursday, and about a dozen states, most of which lean Democratic, refused to sign. In a separate ruling on Thursday, Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher of the Federal District Court in Maryland postponed enforcement nationwide of a memo the administration sent to schools in February, which said that federal civil rights laws ban certain D.E.I. efforts. Judge Gallagher, a Trump appointee, said the administration had not followed proper procedure in adopting a new legal framework. A third judge, Dabney L. Friedrich of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., also paused enforcement of the D.E.I. policy, saying from the bench that it provided “no clear boundaries” for what did and did not constitute D.E.I. Judge Friedrich is also a Trump appointee. These postponements will hold while the cases proceed. The Trump administration is expected to appeal any rulings against it.The Department of Education did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on the rulings. In issuing its ban on D.E.I., the administration had employed a novel legal strategy, arguing that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions also applied to K-12 education. The government has said that the ruling means public schools should end programs meant to serve specific racial groups. The Trump administration has not offered a detailed definition of what it calls “illegal D.E.I. practices.” But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students, such as Black boys, amount to illegal segregation. The administration has also argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory toward white children. Several Republican-leaning states have signed the administration’s letter attesting that they do not use certain D.E.I. practices. But many already had regulations in place restricting how race and gender could be discussed in schools. North Carolina took a different approach. It signed the letter, but said it disagreed with Mr. Trump’s interpretation of civil rights law, and argued that the attempted ban on D.E.I. had overstepped the department’s authority. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We will continue working to ensure fairness, remove barriers to opportunity, and make decisions based on merit and need,” wrote Maurice “Mo” Green, the Democratic state superintendent, in a letter to Linda McMahon, the education secretary. In a hearing in the New Hampshire case last week, Judge McCafferty noted that the administration had sought to ban lessons that caused white students to feel “shame.” She asked an administration lawyer whether students could still engage with history lessons that traced the concept of structural racism through events like slavery, Jim Crow and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, in which a thriving Black neighborhood was destroyed by a white mob. Would teaching such a class be illegal, she asked, if it caused a student to feel ashamed of that history? A lawyer for the Justice Department, Abhishek Kambli, responded, “It goes toward how they treat the current students, not what they teach.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the lead plaintiff in that case, said, “Today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.” There were some bright spots for the government on Thursday. Judge Gallagher of the Maryland court declined a request from plaintiffs for the Trump administration to take down a website it created to collect reports from the public of D.E.I. practices in schools. “The government is entitled to express its viewpoint on its website and to maintain a reporting portal,” Judge Gallagher wrote. The future of Mr. Trump’s education agenda may be decided at the Supreme Court. Last year, the justices declined to hear a case on diversity efforts in the admissions system of a selective public high school in Virginia. That choice seemed to suggest that the court was not yet ready to make a statement on how its ruling against affirmative action in college admissions applied to K-12 education. But Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative legal group that brought the case challenging affirmative action, said he continued to believe the Supreme Court decision had set a precedent for the entire education system, including K-12 public schools. His group has filed an amicus brief in the New Hampshire suit, backing the Trump administration’s reading of civil rights law. “As some of the justices have signaled, it is my belief that the court is waiting for a case with the right procedural posture and factual record to address K-12 racial policies and programs,” Mr. Blum said.

For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials. But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start. The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of “The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,” it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government’s foreign aid programs. According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school’s leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president. The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy’s library, and the school’s cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy’s in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon’s chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief. The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution’s academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon. A Discussion of Coups and CorruptionEven before the presidential election, the academy began preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power. In January 2024, the academy’s history department had invited Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, to give a lecture as part of a prestigious annual series that has brought eminent historians to the campus since 1980. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT She was scheduled to speak on Oct. 10 about how the military in Italy and Chile had adapted to autocratic takeovers of those countries. The title of her lecture was “Militaries and Authoritarian Regimes: Coups, Corruption and the Costs of Losing Democracy.”Ms. Ben-Ghiat, who had written and spoken critically about Mr. Trump, said she had not intended to discuss what she considers his authoritarian tendencies in front of the students as part of the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture series at the academy. Even so, just a week before her lecture, an off-campus group formed in opposition to her invitation. After reports about the upcoming lecture by right-wing outlets, Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, wrote to Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy’s superintendent, on Oct. 3 urging her to disinvite Ms. Ben-Ghiat from speaking to the midshipmen, as the students are called. The next day the Naval Academy’s dean of academics, Samara L. Firebaugh, called to say the lecture had been postponed, Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled. It was one month before the election. Although victorious, the critics still were not satisfied. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist criticized Ms. Ben-Ghiat’s invitation, even after it was revoked. A group of 17 House Republicans said in a letter to Admiral Davids that the situation had raised concerns about “the academy’s process for choosing guest speakers.” Editors’ Picks Hey ChatGPT, Which One of These Is the Real Sam Altman? 36 Hours in Rome Is There a Least Bad Alcohol? Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled that she was told that the lecture was a potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law that limits certain political activities of federal employees. “That would have only been true if I had been talking about current U.S. politics and Trump’s attitude to the U.S. military, and that was never part of the plan,” she said. Ms. Ben-Ghiat now assumes that the lecture will never be rescheduled. “A small purge was orchestrated,” she wrote in February about the cancellation of her lecture, “to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place.” “It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more,” she added.

Mati Carbon has an ambitious goal: remove 100 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2040—and help 100 million farmers in the Global South along the way. The company, which currently operates on farms in India, and is looking to expand to Zambia and Tanzania, just got one step closer to achieving its goal. After competing in a four-year global competition that invited teams to come up with—and show a pathway to scale—a carbon removal solution, Mati was awarded the XPrize Carbon Removal, a $50 million award that will help the company scale its operation, which was announced onstage at the TIME100 Summit on April 23. Advertisement “The prize itself is really trying to develop new solutions that can complement other climate solutions,” says Nikki Batchelor, XPRIZE Carbon Removal’s executive director. “So we also always state, first and foremost, that we need to reduce emissions as dramatically as possible… but the science now shows us that we also will need to remove carbon alongside that, [and] we need to be developing and maturing those technologies and solutions now in order to have them ready by 2050 when the world will need to be operating at gigaton scale.” TIME spoke with Shantanu Agarwal and Jake Jordan, Mati’s CEO and chief science officer, about how the technology they use, known as enhanced rock weathering, could provide a scalable carbon removal practice—while improving soil health and providing life changing support for farmers around the world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Advertisement TIME: What is Mati Carbon aiming to do? Shantanu Agarwal: Mati Carbon has developed a revolutionary technology to scale gigaton carbon removal that builds climate resilience and provides economic empowerment to potentially more than 100 million smaller farmers in the developing economies of the world using a natural process called enhanced rock weathering. What is enhanced rock weathering and how does it fit into the broader climate fight? Jake Jordan: Rock weathering happens on Earth all the time. Rocks break down when rain and water wash over them. So what we're doing is we're pulverizing volcanic rock, we're putting it on the fields of our partnered small holder farmers. When that pulverized rock comes into contact with water and gas, it starts to break down. And unfortunately, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is ever rising, so a lot of the gas that this rock is in contact with when it gets wet and is being broken down is CO2. When that rock interacts with that water and that CO2 at the same time, the CO2 can actually be reorganized chemically into a dissolved phase of carbon called bicarbonate, which stays in the water in the field and eventually drains into rivers, aquifers or oceans, where it can be stored for millennia. That makes it what we call durable carbon dioxide removal. Advertisement And an added bonus—when those rocks break down in the field, they're releasing all of the little goodies and nutrients that are contained in those minerals, and they end up in the farmers field, which is why, not only does our climate solution durably remove carbon dioxide, but it actually [helps] some of the most vulnerable farmers who are the most affected by climate change and the least responsible for it. So we see that as sort of a double win for us. Part of the X Prize competition involved showing that the work could be scaled to remove gigatons of carbon a year. How would Mati Carbon do this? Agarwal: For Mati carbon, that means thousands and thousands of locations, which we call “bases.” Each base is serving five to 10,000 farmers, and we want to replicate these bases across the planet, serving millions and millions of farmers. So as we have showcased in our demonstration to XPRIZE, [there are] three fully commercial bases which we have in India. And they came and diligenced one of those bases to see how the operating procedures were, how we actually serve the farmers, what the farmer effect was. We have validated and showed them [our] standard unit of scaling, how it operates, the cost, and how it can be copied and pasted across the world. Advertisement How can carbon capture stand to benefit smallhold farmers? Agarwal: The net result [is] that the farmer is getting increased productivity. In typical well-fertilized soils, we're seeing about 20-25% in increased productivity for these farmers. And in degraded soils, we’re seeing 50-70% increased productivity… So there's a huge impact for them, directly in terms of their incomes by the increased productivity, but also their ability to use less pesticide. That's game changing for these people who are living from crop to crop. Suddenly having 30% or 50% increased income means that they can pay off their debt. They can suddenly get more irrigation equipment, or better seeds. It's life changing. What comes next for Mati Carbon? Agarwal: Our company is founded on the basis of [being] farmer-first. And to that extent, we essentially structured our company as a nonprofit, and we chose not to take any equity from venture capital funds. We are essentially dependent on grants and philanthropy to really scale, and that has limited us to not being able to spread out as fast and as much as we would like to. This XPRIZE essentially gives us the wings to dream now… and really run after and achieve the full mission of being able to touch 100 million farmers in the next 15 to 20 years. Advertisement What do you hope people will take away from the work you’re doing? Agarwal: I hope this prize and what we're trying to do gives people hope and gives people direction. There are pathways possible, which help the planet and help smaller farmers and are economically viable for market driven mechanisms. I think Mati Carbon has proven that we can build a viable business with our unique business model, with our unique technology, and compete with the best of the best in the world and come out strong. I want to give that hope to the world, hope to other other competitors, other companies, other folks that we really need to solve the problems which are in front of us and can't just be denying them.

Much of the New York City region was under an air quality advisory on Thursday as smoke from one of New Jersey’s largest wildfires in two decades made its way north. The fire, which has been burning in Ocean County since Tuesday morning, has grown to 15,000 acres, mostly in the heavily forested Pine Barrens. Earlier this week, the fire forced officials to shut down the Garden State Parkway for miles and prompted the temporary evacuation of thousands of people in Ocean and Lacey Townships, the state’s Forest Fire Service said. A man has been charged with arson. Smoke from the fires spread over a large portion of New Jersey on Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting warnings about the air quality and at times irritating peoples’ eyes and making it difficult to breathe. By early Thursday, the smoke had spread to the north, prompting an air quality health advisory that was in effect through the end of the day for New York City as well as Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland Counties. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the air quality index, a measure of pollutants, was likely to climb above 100, which means the air is unhealthy for sensitive groups like very young people or those with asthma or other respiratory problems. At 5 a.m., the air quality index for the New York City region had reached 83, while Newark was at 80 and Philadelphia at 77, all within the moderate risk category. Nearby, Long Island was at 33, which is categorized as “good.” By early afternoon, the index as at 67 in New York, 72 in Newark and 76 in Philadelphia, while Long Island had inched up to 40. The air quality advisories were in effect through midnight. Southwesterly winds on Thursday afternoon were expected to spread the wildfire smoke toward Long Island. “New York and Long Island, especially Long Island and the boroughs in New York are most at risk today,” said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. “Also southern parts of upstate New York, south of Albany and southern Poughkeepsie, but it’s really confined to the metro region.” By Friday the smoke is expected to thin and clear, as stronger winds develop and rain spreads to the region later in the day. There have been no injuries and no homes were damaged as the fire has spread west through the mostly forested area of the Pine Barrens, part of a containment strategy meant to protect homes closer to the coast. On Wednesday, the authorities said they expected the fire to grow even as efforts to contain it gained ground. Fire authorities said the blaze may become one of the largest wildfires in the state since 2007, when a flare dropped by an F-16 fighter jet ignited a fire that ultimately consumed 17,000 acres. Much of the state was at elevated risk for wildfires this week, and by Wednesday the entire state was under a “high” rating, the middle point of a five-point scale that the state uses. Fuel like dry grass that would help any fire spread more easily has been especially dry, as the southern part of the state remains in drought conditions. Rain toward the end of the week is expected to give firefighters a helping hand in bringing the fire more under control. “There’s going to be slight chance of rain later Friday and into Saturday,” Mr. Hurley said. “Saturday is going to be the day with the best chance of rain. So that will definitely help.”