For the foreseeable future, a school that burned during the fires in Los Angeles this year will call a retrofitted Sears home. Students and teachers at Palisades Charter High School have met online since a wildfire swept through Pacific Palisades in January and decimated their school building and many of their homes. On Tuesday, they gathered in person at their school’s temporary new home in nearby Santa Monica, where they hugged, cried and navigated classrooms set up inside the former department store. “After everything we’ve been through — now we have a place to be all of a sudden,” Charlie Speiser, a junior, said. He had commuted over an hour from Hermosa Beach, where his family is living after having lost their home in the fire. The new facility, located on the busy southern edge of Downtown Santa Monica, is called “Pali South.” It will serve students for the remainder of the school year, and potentially well into the next, depending on the speed of recovery at their Palisades campus. About 40 percent of the campus was destroyed in the fire. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The building is a local landmark — a 1947 design by the architect Rowland Crawford, with grooved ivory and green walls. A large blue Pali High sign now replaces what was a neon green Sears sign above the entrance. Inside, 90 classrooms, a few offices and some communal areas have been constructed using a $10 million insurance payment, as well as donations and school funds. Teachers tried to find ways to make the new building feel more like their old school.Robert King, who teaches U.S. history, lost many of the educational props that filled his former classroom, including flags, posters and busts of presidents, after the items were exposed to smoke and chemicals. Students and some alumni gave replacement posters. One student wrote “F104,” the number of Mr. King’s classroom at Pali, on a concrete wall in chalk. By late morning, some students seemed to be settling in, and approved of the new setup. “They nailed it,” said Ocean Silkman, a junior. Still, moving into an enclosed space from what was essentially an outdoor school was an adjustment, several students said. At the Pali High campus, most hallways were outdoors. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We took the sunlight for granted,” Zoya Kassam, a senior, said. As students made their way through the new building, bottlenecks formed and Tiffany Jensen, a junior, said she felt “dazed and confused.” Staff members made adjustments in real time, rerouting the flow. The structure has sat empty since the Sears store closed in 2017, and an attempt to repurpose it as an office was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. “It was completely unclaimed,” said Kelly Farrell, a managing director at the architecture firm Gensler. “We just had to give it purpose and place.”That purpose came just weeks after the wildfire, when Pali High administrators called Ms. Farrell and asked if she could help turn the 100,000-square-foot space into a functioning high school. “Yes,” she recalled telling them. “We don’t know what help means, but we’re going to help you figure it out.” She was at the site that Sunday morning. By mid-March, the design team had put together some sketches. A few days later, the school negotiated a lease of $200,000 from the real estate firms that had been trying to rent it as offices. “No one ever stopped from that point on,” said Pam Magee, Pali High’s principal. Working from dawn to dusk, the crew finished construction in a month. Gensler laid out acoustical panels for walls, and quilted insulation above, to soften the din of high schoolers. It also designed colorful graphics for many surfaces. Tables, desks, chairs, couches and thousands of square feet of carpet were donated. Things that weren’t free came at a discount, or were expedited.The City of Santa Monica helped expedite approvals and encouraged collaboration between its agencies to help the school construction. Since Sears, like most department stores, had few windows, many classrooms are windowless, and there were other sacrifices made for the sake of speed, budget and space. There are no doors on the classrooms, for instance, and no whiteboards on the walls. Students have to use temporary bathroom facilities in the parking lot. And premade lunches are served from what used to be an old Sears delivery window. The school will use other schools’ athletic and theater facilities and public parks. But for students, many of whom remember learning remotely during the pandemic, the thrill of being together seemed to outweigh the hardships. “So many people are so happy to get back to in person,” Tiffany Jensen said. Many Pali High students may not go to school at the new facility. Some have opted to continue partial online learning, and about 500 have moved to other schools.How long the school will remain in Santa Monica is unclear. Nick Melvoin, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns Pali’s Palisades campus, said that treatment of smoke and other damage at the school’s surviving buildings, and the placement of portable classrooms on the baseball field, should be completed by July or August.But the surrounding neighborhood is still decimated, and nearby Temescal Canyon Road is filled with both fire-related debris and trucks hauling it away. Many families and educators in the school have voiced concerns about students’ physical and mental well-being if they return too soon. Ms. Magee, the principal, said that even if the new building were temporary, she hoped it would provide hope. “It’s not just about reopening a school,” she said. “It’s about restoring a community.”

Surrounded by a group of 10th graders, Alex Asal, a museum educator at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, read aloud from three school lunch menus. She asked the students to raise their hands for which sounded best. One menu had options such as pizza, Caribbean rice salad and fresh apples. Another had grilled cheese, tomato soup and green beans. The third featured creamed beef on toast and creamed salmon with a roll. That menu — which did prompt a few raised hands — was from 1914, Asal revealed. A century ago, butter and cream were considered as vital as fruits and vegetables are today because the concern was less about what children ate than whether they ate enough at all. The exhibition that had drawn students from the Octorara Area School District of Atglen, Pa., was “Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray.” It examines how this cornerstone of childhood became deeply intertwined with American politics, culture and scientific progress. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT From the earliest school food programs until now, “what’s been interesting for us about this topic is how discourses of nutrition and science have always been present,” said Jesse Smith, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs and digital content.Smith didn’t anticipate just how timely the exhibition would be when it opened about a month before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed secretary of health and human services by President Trump, promotes the removal of processed foods from school lunches. History shows that his isn’t the first attempt to change what people eat.“Lunchtime” was developed from the Science History Institute’s collection of books and scientific instruments related to food science. Located just down the street from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, the small museum and research library teaches the history of how science has shaped our everyday lives. In 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act authorizing the creation of the National School Lunch Program. According to the Food Research & Action Center, just over 28.1 million children participated in the school lunch program in the 2022-23 school year on an average day, with 19.7 million receiving a free or reduced-price lunch. In the 2023-24 school year, some 23.6 million students were enrolled in high-poverty districts that qualify for free lunch for all.“It’s a service to students, and something we provide on a daily basis to help the students learn,” said Lisa Norton, executive director of the division of food services for the Philadelphia school district. “And we know that there are students that this is the only meal they are going to see.”The exhibition opens with the 1800s, as industrialization brings people to cities, far from the source of their food. Producers would cut corners, mixing wood shavings with cinnamon and chalk into flour. “Probably the most notorious example was the dairy industry, which routinely added formaldehyde to milk to keep it from spoiling,” Asal said. And school medical inspections found that children were severely undernourished. Scurvy and rickets were widespread. The Institute of Child Nutrition, at the University of Mississippi, maintains an archive of photographs, oral histories, books and manuscripts, and Jeffrey Boyce, the institute’s coordinator of archival services, provided several photographs for the exhibit. One shows a baby being fed cod liver oil, an old-fashioned remedy for vitamin A and D deficiency, in the age before vitamin-fortified cereal. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Philadelphia became one of the first cities to have a school lunch program and, over the next few decades, local programs spread across the country in a movement led largely by women. A federal response to school lunches would come from the National School Lunch Act. “The National School Lunch Program is the longest running children’s health program in U.S. history, and it has an outsized impact on nutritional health,” said Andrew R. Ruis, author of the book “Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States,” which Smith used as a resource for the exhibit. “Research in the ’20s and ’30s showed overwhelmingly that school lunch programs had a huge impact on student health, on educational attainment, on behavior and attitude.”As farmers faced ruin in the wake of the Great Depression, the Department of Agriculture purchased surplus crops to distribute to U.S. schools and as foreign aid. This decades-old partnership made headlines in March when the U.S.D.A. announced plans to cut $1 billion in funding to schools and food banks. School lunch programs have wide public support, but that has never stopped them from being a political football. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement drew attention to the fact that many poor children were still going hungry. The Black Panthers’ free breakfast program helped fill the gap and put pressure on politicians. A table in the exhibition piled with Spam, TV dinners, bagged salad and Cheetos explained how military research into preservation created iconic American foods. These advancements, however, also helped put nutrition back under the microscope and led to the concern that young people were getting too much of the wrong kinds of foods. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The 1973 board game “Super Sandwich” tried to make nutrition fun, with players competing to collect foods that met recommended dietary allowances. Remember the controversy in the 1980s over whether ketchup qualified as a vegetable? It erupted in a larger battle over school lunch program cuts under the Reagan administration and further inflamed the national debate over school lunch quality. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and the public health campaign for children by the first lady, Michelle Obama, resulted in more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains and less sodium and sugar on lunch trays. But balancing those regulations with what young people will eat is a challenge, said Elizabeth Keegan, the coordinator of dietetic services for the Philadelphia school district who advised on the exhibition. Especially when median lunch prices, according to the School Nutrition Association, hover around $3.“We always say, for less than what you pay for a latte, schools have to serve a full meal,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, the association’s director of media relations. Following their tour, the Octorara students reflected on the tales of wood shavings in food. They debated the quality of their own school lunches and what they would prefer: more variety, more vegetarian and vegan options, less junk food. “It made me feel like we should get better food,” said Malia Maxie, 16. “When she was talking about 1914, like how they got salmon — we don’t get that anymore.”Those from generations raised on rectangular pizza may see it differently. “From the days when I was in school, the meal program has totally transformed,” said Aleshia Hall-Campbell, executive director of the Institute of Child Nutrition. “You have some districts out here that are actually growing produce and incorporating it in the menus. You have edamame at salad bars. They are trying to recreate what kids are eating out in restaurants and fast-food places, incorporating it from a healthier level.” Everyone has memories of school lunch. Boyce remembers “the best macaroni and cheese on the planet” and the names of the cafeteria ladies. Smith remembers the Salisbury steak and that distinct cafeteria smell. For Ruis, the best day of the year was when his Bay Area school had IT’S-IT, a local ice-cream sandwich with oatmeal cookies. “So much has changed, standards have changed, and what is considered healthy has changed,” Keegan said. “But something that has never changed is that feeding kids a nutritious meal is important.”

In a Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, Mahmoud Khalil remained confined as his wife gave birth to their son on Monday—over 1,000 miles away from the hospital room where he would have been standing. The separation wasn't due to logistical impossibility but a denied request for temporary release, highlighting what some experts describe as a pattern of using family separation as leverage against specific communities. "This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer," Dr. Noor Abdalla said in a statement the day she gave birth. "My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud." Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, was arrested on March 8th following his participation in campus protests against the war in Gaza. His subsequent placement in ICE custody made his deportment case the most prominent in the new Trump administration. But advocates say that keeping Khalil from the birth of his son adds familiar, and cruel, elements from the president’s first term. Though Khalil's case is still unfolding, his situation echoes a history of family separation policies that created a major scandal in the first Trump administration, and appears to have blended with the President’s track record of hostility toward Muslims, according to experts. Trump's "zero tolerance" border policy enforced family separations at the Mexican border in 2018, a year after the newly installed President imposed a "Muslim ban," a series of policies and executive orders preventing families from seven predominantly Muslim countries from, among other things, reuniting on American soil. “ Family separation in particular is a very cruel policy tool that the Trump administration has relied on in both of his administrations,” says Yasmine Taeb, a human rights lawyer and progressive strategist who worked to undo the 2017 travel bans. “ In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, there's a reason he was sent to a detention center notorious for abuse thousands of miles away from his support system, from his wife, and now his newborn baby.” She pointed to other prominent cases: Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar pursuing her Ph.D. at Tufts University, was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents on March 25, 2025, near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her detention followed the revocation of her student visa due to her part in pro-Palestinian activism, specifically co-authoring an op-ed in Tufts' student newspaper, according to the U.S. State Department. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was detained by ICE on April 14, 2025, during his naturalization interview in Colchester, Vermont. Mahdawi, who had organized pro-Palestinian protests on campus, became a legal permanent resident of the U.S. in 2015. “ The fact that Mahmoud, Mohsen, Rumeysa, and other students have been targeted simply for advocating for Palestinian rights should alarm and scare all of us,” Taeb said. The Trump Administration has repeatedly equated pro-Palestinian activism with anti-semitism—an equation challenged by the participation of Jewish students and activists among those protesting Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war. The war was sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that resulted in 1,200 deaths and the kidnapping of more than 200 hostages; Israel’s retaliatory strikes have claimed more than 50,000 lives, a majority of them civilian, according to the figures from Hamas-controlled Palestinian health authorities called reliable by the U.S. and U.N. Muslims in the U.S. are wary not only of being cast as scapegoats, but of what can come with it. In the months following the September 11 attacks, hundreds of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were detained, some in what the Department of Justice later described as "unduly harsh" conditions. Many families had no information about their loved ones' whereabouts for weeks or months, worsened by communication blackouts that prevented contact via phone, mail or visiting. Beyond the political dimensions, family separation inflicts profound psychological harm, according to mental health professionals. “To be kept from your newborn child not by choice but by systemic barriers is a unique kind of heartbreak,” says Muna Egeh, a supervised intern psychotherapist for Ruh Care, an online therapy service focused on Muslim clients. “For Mahmoud Khalil, this isn’t just about immigration policy; it’s about missing a sacred, once-in-a-lifetime moment. The emotional toll of such separation can leave lasting wounds, not only for the parent but for the child whose first days begin without their father’s presence.” In Khalil's case, immigration authorities had discretion to grant temporary humanitarian release—a practice regularly employed for circumstances like family births or deaths—but chose not to exercise. “ICE’s cruelty is boundless,” said Baher Azmy, Legal Director of the Center of Constitutional Rights and attorney for Khalil. “Its small-minded refusal to grant Mahmoud and Noor the most basic human gesture, to care for each other in this pivotal life moment, is an extension of their vindictive and arbitrary decision to arrest and attempt to deport him. The humanity of Mahmoud and his family will, in the end, be what we all remember.” Dr. Abdalla connects her family's separation directly to Khalil's political activism. "ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud's support for Palestinian freedom," she said. Civil liberties organizations have expressed concern about the implications on speech that the Constitution regards as protected. Trump warned in a White House fact sheet “to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” For Dr. Abdalla, the focus remains on reuniting her family. "I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us," she said. "I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad."

When white smoke billowed out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on March 13, 2013, alerting the public that the 115 cardinal electors inside had concluded their voting, few members of the public might have expected the Catholic Church’s 266th Pope to be Jorge Mario Bergoglio. At 76, Bergoglio was considered too old to be included on most media lists of papabili, or likely candidates for Pope. Prior to his papacy, bishops and cardinals typically submitted their resignations at 75. And the cardinal electors, who have always elected one of their own ranks, have an age cap of 80. Hailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bergoglio became the first Latin American Pope and the first non-European Pope in over 1,200 years. He was also the first Jesuit Pope—a Catholic religious order that emphasizes service to the marginalized. Upon his election, Bergoglio took the name Francis after Saint Francis of Assisi, who was known for his asceticism and ministry to the poor. Overall, Francis was regarded as less conservative than his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. With Francis’ death on Monday, at age 88, up to 135 eligible cardinal electors will decide on his successor. One hundred and eight—or 80%—of them were appointed by Francis during his papacy. It’s a fact that has left some wondering if the late Pope essentially “packed the court” to guarantee a continuation of his legacy. But experts suggest it’ll be as difficult to predict as Francis’ own election was. “It’s very simplistic to say cardinals just vote along ideological lines as though they’re part of political parties,” Pattenden says. “That’s not how the Vatican works.” Pattenden also points to an Italian proverb: “After a fat Pope comes a thin one.” “The idea of that is essentially that the cardinals very often focus on what they didn’t like about the previous Pope, all the things they thought were his faults and flaws, and they look for someone who remedies those.” The first question on cardinals’ minds will be whether they want change or continuity. This conclave is already likely to be different from those in the past, however, Pattenden says. Firstly, it’s the largest number of eligible cardinal electors—in fact, it’s the first time that the number of eligible electors at a conclave has exceeded the traditional cap of 120, although Pattenden says it’s unlikely that the cap will be enforced. Secondly, the cardinals now are more geographically diverse than ever. In 2013, 51% of cardinal electors were European. Now, around 39% are, while around 18% come from the Asia-Pacific, 18% from Latin America and the Caribbean, 12% come from Sub-Saharan Africa, 10% from North America, and 3% come from the Middle East and North Africa. Francis played a big role in that shift. Of the 108 he appointed, 38% came from Europe, 19% from Latin America and the Caribbean, 19% from the Asia-Pacific, 12% from sub-Saharan Africa, 7% from North America, and 4% from the Middle East and North Africa. Francis appointed cardinals from 25 countries that had never before had one. His appointments include Chibly Langlois, the first cardinal from Haiti, Charles Maung Bo, the first cardinal from Myanmar, and Hyderabad Anthony Poola, the first of India’s Dalit caste. On many papabili lists, the range of candidates include several who would be historic firsts as pontiffs from Asia, such as Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, or Africa, such as Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson. Francis prioritized inclusion within the Vatican, Pattenden explains, and so in appointing cardinals, he looked across the world, often to small Catholic communities that had not been represented before: He felt that “it shouldn’t just be the case that big, well-established, rich, old Catholic communities get representation all the time,” but ideologically, “Francis can’t necessarily have known how all of these new cardinals will think, certainly their colleagues won’t know—they may not even know themselves.” Carlos Eire, a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, however, thinks it’s likely that those Francis appointed will indeed lean ideologically left, noting that Francis did not appoint many conservative bishops to the College of Cardinals and that, while geographic diversity was a priority of his, theological diversity was not. Francis, for example, appointed American Robert McElroy in 2022, who is known for his advocacy on immigration and the environment and inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics, while reportedly bypassing more conservative archbishops. “When it comes to religious issues,” says Eire, “it is also highly likely that they will lean away from traditionalism.” “Voting for a Pope is not much different from any other kind of voting. The voters have their preferences,” adds Eire. “The only difference between this conclave and the House of Representatives or the European Parliament is that the cardinals pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit.” But, Pattenden says, it could come down more to charisma, competence, and piety than to ideology. On that measure, the geographic diversity of the College of Cardinals could make this conclave particularly unpredictable. “They don’t know each other as well as previous groups of cardinals will have done, and that’s bound to have an impact,” Pattenden says. “When you have to focus on one person’s name to write down on that ballot paper, it may or may not be easier if you actually know the guy or if you’ve just met him a week or two before.” If the result of that favors better known cardinals, Pattenden says Tagle from the Philippines, who is known as one of the most charismatic figures in the college, or Pietro Parolin, who is the highest-ranking cardinal in the electing conclave, would be frontrunners. If neither of those two—or any other candidate—achieves the required two-thirds majority to win, it’s likely that cardinals “start casting a wider net,” says Pattenden, to candidates who may not have been their first choice. “It’s a very secretive process … The Church is very, very careful that we don’t really know what happened,” Pattenden says, and what reports do come out later are often still not verified. “This matters a lot in terms of the theology of the election: the idea is that God, through the Holy Spirit, comes down on the cardinals and inspires them and their choice. But the more that we know about what was said to who and who voted for what, the less plausible that idea is.”

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. The knives are out for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While top White House officials insist the growing questions surrounding the Defense Secretary's behavior is proof he's threatening the status quo, the sentiment across much of the capital is far less charitable. Amid the fallout of news that he shared military targets to a second group chat, this time from his personal phone and to family members, there is a growing sense that the former Fox News weekend host is poised to be one of the first senior members of the Administration to be shown the exit. The only real question at this point is the length of Trump’s fuse amid the constant pummeling Hegseth and others are facing for being so reckless with highly sensitive information that, in another timeline, could have cost Americans their lives. By Tuesday afternoon, it seemed this might well be a slow burn. The New York Times on Sunday published a bombshell story that revealed Hegseth last month shared flight schedules for F/A-18 Hornets en route to bomb Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. NBC News reported on Tuesday that Hegseth had shared that info after receiving it from a top U.S. general using a secure U.S. government system intended for sensitive and classified information. Privately, Republicans are bracing for further embarrassing disclosures in the wings, as first reported by NOTUS. Many in the party never really liked the former TV personality for the role of running the world’s largest employer. (The Department of Defense employs more than 3 million people in military or civilian roles.) His confirmation hearings dealt with reports of alcohol abuse, hush money to settle a sexual assault allegation, and organizational mismanagement with a veterans group. His confirmation vote was a dead tie in the Senate, requiring Vice President J.D. Vance to drag Hegseth across the finish line past unified Democratic opposition and nay votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell, the influential former Republican Leader, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Since breezing into the Pentagon with promises of de-woke-ifying and re-warrior-izing, Hegseth’s tenure hasn’t exactly been confidence inspiring. National security hawks in both parties are watching the Pentagon for daily dust-ups that shake America’s image and remake its top ranks. He was sharing bombing details on a first group chat that somehow included the top editor of The Atlantic, and then on another one with his family. His inner circle was dismantled last week, ostensibly over leaked information about a pending briefing on China for Elon Musk. And Hegseth’s top spokesman went rogue and published a highly critical assessment of the Secretary’s tenure: “In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.” Hill Republicans are begrudgingly grateful that the news of the second group chat emerged while most are out of town, at home for a holiday work period that continues through this week. But several lawmakers have been using their best stage whisper to urge Leadership teams in the House and Senate that this sort of sloppy handling of sensitive information cannot become normalized. So far, just one Republican lawmaker—former Air Force General and current Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska—has put his name on pointed criticism of Hegseth but there is a sense that the time for choosing will come when Congress comes back next week. It’s going to get tougher to stay silent, especially as Democrats are planning a coordinated effort to suss out just how Trump administration officials are using third-party platforms like Signal and Gmail to potentially skirt keeping a full record of their correspondence. Yet even some Republicans tired of Hegseth are wary of seeing him pushed out. After all, as one Republican who helped Hegseth salvage his nomination told me, there is little reason to think Trump would turn to a polished pro for that role now, or that a quick confirmation process is in the offing. A Hegseth-run DOD may look positively orderly compared to what follows, some fear. At the White House, a tone of public defiance has settled in. Trump and Hegseth spoke just hours after the Times report went online Sunday and they seemed simpatico in a belief that the revelations were coming from disgruntled employees and so-called Deep State defenders of business as usual. But the contradiction was apparent for anyone willing to scratch the surface: the three public suspensions and one defection from the Pentagon’s top ranks were all, until very recently, Hegseth loyalists. It’s not clear that they would have been behind the leak about Hegseth’s chat history; and it’s worth noting that the White House has not disputed the accuracy of those stories, only the interpretation about just how bad they are. For his part, Hegseth returned to the morning show he hosted for years to bat away the furor, but noticeably did not deny the underlying story, either. “Once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker,” Hegseth said Tuesday. “I don’t have time for leakers. I don’t have time for the hoax press that peddles old stories from disgruntled employees.” Speaking to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the latest reports part of a “smear campaign” against a change agent and again denied reporting that says those close to Trump are looking for a replacement. Instead, she cast all of this as a betrayal—by the people who told the Times about the Signal group chat in the first place, suggesting they would be held to criminal account. "We are not going to tolerate individuals who leaked to the mainstream media, particularly when it comes to sensitive information,” Leavitt said. “The President stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth and the change that he is bringing to the Pentagon. The results he has achieved thus far speak for themselves.” That may be the case at present, but betting on Trump to stay the course is seldom a good wager. Republicans who have spoken with the White House say Trump is committed to keeping Hegseth, although there is the long-running understanding that the President’s loyalty is inviolable until it isn’t. During his first term, Trump dumped just about anyone at any time—for bringing bad headlines, for getting headlines that were too good, for inching too close to the spotlight, or bumping Trump from the front page. This time, Trump seems determined not to give his critics a single win, doubling down when other Presidents would have ditched the trouble. (Remember when Barack Obama ditched the top general in Afghanistan for a series of disparaging comments to Rolling Stone about his team? Stanley McCrystal sure does.) So, for now, there is merely the constant glare on Hegseth, who seems to be atop a fast-flaking camp of defenders. Trump, who has made this his weekly Waterloo, has stood by Cabinet officials far longer with far less threatening incoming. Now, Washington is just waiting to see where a second-term Trump has parked his pain threshold.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a massive overhaul of the State Department on Tuesday, with plans to reduce staff in the U.S. by 15% while closing and consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide as part of the Trump administration's “America First” mandate. The reorganization plan, announced by Rubio on social media and detailed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, is the latest effort by the White House to reimagine U.S. foreign policy and scale back the size of the federal government. The restructuring was driven in part by the need to find a new home for the remaining functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that Trump administration officials and billionaire ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have dismantled. “We cannot win the battle for the 21st century with bloated bureaucracy that stifles innovation and misallocates scarce resources,” Rubio said in a department-wide email obtained by AP. He said the reorganization aimed to “meet the immense challenges of the 21st Century and put America First.” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce echoed that sentiment, saying the “sweeping changes will empower our talented diplomats" but would not result in the immediate dismissal of personnel. “It’s not something where people are being fired today," Bruce told reporters Tuesday. "They’re not going to be walking out of the building. It’s not that kind of a dynamic. It is a roadmap. It’s a plan.” It includes consolidating 734 bureaus and offices down to 602, as well as transitioning 137 offices to another location within the department to "increase efficiency,” according to a fact sheet obtained by AP. There will be a “reimagined” office focused on foreign and humani Although the plan will implement major changes in the department’s bureaucracy and personnel, it is far less drastic than an alleged reorganization plan that was circulated by some officials over the weekend. Numerous senior State Department officials, including Rubio himself, denied that the plan was real. Work that had been believed targeted in that alleged leaked document survived — at least as bureau names on a chart — in the plan that Rubio released Tuesday. That includes offices for Africa affairs, migration and refugee issues, and democracy efforts. It was not immediately clear whether U.S. embassies were included in the installations slated for closing. The earlier reports of wholesale closings of embassies, especially in Africa, had triggered warnings about shrinking the U.S. diplomatic capacity and influence abroad. Some of the bureaus that are indeed expected to be cut in the new plan include the Office of Global Women's Issues and the State Department’s diversity and inclusion efforts, which have been eliminated government-wide under Trump. An office charged with surging expertise to war zones and other erupting crises will be eliminated, while other bureaus focused on human rights and justice will be scaled back or folded into other sections of the department. Daryl Grisgraber, a policy lead with humanitarian organization Oxfam America, said this development only creates more “uncertainty” about the United States' ability to contribute to humanitarian conflicts and will “only make the world a more unstable, unequal place for us all.” It is unclear if the reorganization would be implemented through an executive order or other means. The plans came a week after the AP learned that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget proposed gutting the State Department’s budget by almost 50% and eliminating funding for the United Nations and NATO headquarters. While the budget proposal was still in a highly preliminary phase and not expected to pass muster with Congress, the reorganization plan got an initial nod of approval from Republicans on Capitol Hill. “Change is not easy, but President Trump and Secretary Rubio have proposed a vision to remake the State Department for this century and the fights that we face today, as well as those that lie ahead of us,” Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. Democrats, meanwhile, blasted the effort as the Trump administration's latest attempt to gut “vital components of American influence” on the world stage. “On its face, this new reorganization plan raises grave concerns that the United States will no longer have either the capacity or capability to exert U.S. global leadership, achieve critical national security objectives, stand up to our adversaries, save lives, and promote democratic values,” Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said. Some lawmakers said the move is a departure from the work Rubio supported as a senator. "The vital work left on Secretary Rubio’s cutting-room floor represents significant pillars of our foreign policy long supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, including former Senator Rubio — not ‘radical ideologies’ as he now claims,” said New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The proposed changes at the State Department come as the Trump administration has been slashing jobs and funding across agencies, from the Education Department to Health and Human Services. On foreign policy, beyond the destruction of USAID, the administration also has moved to defund so-called other “soft power” institutions like media outlets delivering objective news, often to authoritarian countries, including the Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and Radio/TV Marti, which broadcasts to Cuba. —Amiri reported from the United Nations and Lee from London.

The world’s wealthiest university is under attack by one of the world’s richest, most powerful men. The reasons have to do with disagreements about antisemitism, racial politics and raw power. But the fight, which the government accelerated with a mistimed letter, is also about taking Harvard and its billions down several notches. The Trump administration has frozen more than $2.2 billion in grants and contracts that were intended for Harvard, which is also America’s oldest institution of higher education. As Harvard and President Trump face off over the government’s intrusive demands, the university’s riches have emerged as a flashpoint. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he may want to take every last penny the government sends to the institution — and, if the Internal Revenue Service strips Harvard of its tax-exempt status, maybe collect more from the university, too. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Monday, the university sued the administration, arguing the government had overstepped. The question is whether Harvard can handle the blow if its legal effort is unsuccessful. A Balance Sheet of Billions Harvard was sitting on $64 billion at the end of its most recent fiscal year, after factoring in its various debts. By comparison, this year’s Massachusetts state budget is worth about $58 billion. Money flows into the university each year from a variety of sources, including research grants, donations and, of course, tuition. (The sticker price is soon to be $59,320; room and board and other fees tack on nearly $30,000 more.) But most of Harvard’s wealth — more than $53 billion — is kept in its endowment, which resembles an enormous retirement account that is built to last. It might seem simple for Harvard to dip into those funds in an emergency like the one it is facing now. Many people, including former President Barack Obama and Harvard’s own former president, Lawrence H. Summers, have urged it to do just that — and it can, to some extent. But tapping an endowment is hardly automatic. At Harvard, the endowment is not just a single account from which the university can make withdrawals. Rather, it is broken up into more than 14,000 funds, many of them connected to donations from individuals or family foundations. Endowments, it is fair to say, can be more about egos than emergencies. Many donors, whether they are giving to a university or a house of worship or an aquarium, attach specific rules to their contributions. At Harvard, roughly 80 percent of the endowment is restricted, a higher share than at some other top institutions, including Yale and Princeton. Universities often have limited leeway to change these terms on their own. Harvard leaders, like their counterparts across the country, also carefully guard the endowment as a marker of prestige. But more fundamentally, endowments are designed to provide a permanent flow of money, so removing enormous sums could threaten the university’s long-term viability. Instead, Harvard is among the institutions that make regular, modest withdrawals. Those withdrawals help the university to pay its bills, which run to more than $6 billion a year. In recent years, Harvard has pulled out somewhere between 4.2 percent and 6.1 percent of its endowment’s market value. For 2024, that added up to $2.4 billion. The university has other resources, too. Its general operating account, for example, has billions in unrestricted investments that the university could deploy at will. It also has vast real estate holdings. By Harvard’s estimate, its land alone is worth more than $1 billion. And more than 20 percent of revenue comes from tuition, room, board and the like. But an essential category accounts for about 11 percent of Harvard’s revenue: federally sponsored research. In its most recent fiscal year, Harvard received about $687 million in research funding from Washington.What Trump’s Cuts Could Unleash Harvard, like many other research universities around the country, has become dependent on the federal government to underwrite some of the most important work its doctors, engineers and scientists do. Most federal research money that flows to Harvard comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2023, almost $150 million a year came from other federal agencies, including the intelligence community, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The full scale of the government’s newly announced cuts to Harvard is still coming into view, in part because the university is learning details as researchers receive so-called stop-work orders from the government. Among the projects targeted so far: work on a diagnostic tool for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or A.L.S.; research on space travel and radiation sickness; and a $60 million effort to combat tuberculosis. Harvard, which says it funded $489 million in research itself in 2023, has warned that many projects “will come to a halt midstream” if federal funding evaporates. The university imposed a hiring freeze last month and could ultimately turn to layoffs, lab closures and other steps.

Many have grown to embrace the convenience of telehealth brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. But now researchers have found that taking your doctor’s appointments from the couch could have another upside: it’s good for the environment. A new study, published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Managed Care on April 22, has found the use of telemedicine could have an impact in reducing carbon emissions. The findings showed that telehealth decreased the number of cars on the road in the U.S., reducing monthly carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-powered cars. Researchers quantified nearly 1.5 million telemedicine visits in urban and rural areas between April 1 and June 30, 2023 and estimated that anywhere between 741,000 to 1.35 million of those visits were substitutes for in-person visits. Using those calculations, they determined that telemedicine use cut CO2 emissions by a range of roughly 23,500 and 52,500 tons each month during the time studied—equivalent to the emissions produced by 61,000 to 130,000 gas powered vehicles. “The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” Dr. A. Mark Fendrick, the study’s co-senior author and professor of medicine and director of Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a press release. The U.S. health system currently contributes almost 9% of the country’s emissions, while transportation accounts for about 29%. “Our findings suggest that the environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions.” The health care system has not shied away from the need to lower its carbon footprint. Around the world, some clinics are reconsidering what items can be reused or recycled, as well as beginning to phase out an anesthetic known as desflurane, one bottle of which is equivalent to driving a gas car 2,200 miles.. Some limitations remain, however. The researchers of the new study say that, though the participants had sociodemographic characteristics that were similar to those of U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the findings may not represent the broader population or account for regional variations, such as seasonal trends or internet access. Telemedicine use has also fallen since the end of the COVID pandemic, which could have led them to overestimate the true amount of averted emissions in the future. All the same, the findings could help sway policies, researchers say, as Congress continues to debate the extension of pandemic-era flexibilities and Medicare waivers for the use of telehealth.

As an institution devoted to telling the story of the sea, the Mystic Seaport Museum has an inherently close relationship with water. Sitting along the Mystic River in southeastern Connecticut, its campus spans 19 acres and nearly 150 structures, including exhibition spaces and a re-creation of a 19th-century New England coastal town. Along the museum’s waterfront, it has an active seaport and a marina where roughly 900 boats dock annually. For nearly a century, the organization has maintained a harmonious relationship with the river. Flooding caused by storms, high tides and heavy winds occurred occasionally, but were not cause for great alarm. However, with storms becoming more severe and sea levels expected to rise substantially in the coming decades, the museum faces a daunting challenge: how to stave off the inevitable. Planning has begun to protect the museum’s history and properties, but the scope of the effort, as well as the costs, are immense. Nevertheless, the museum may have little choice. “Twenty years ago, there might have been an inundation a few times a year,” Chad Frost, principal of the landscape architecture firm Kent and Frost, which has been working with the museum for two decades, said in a video interview. “Now, we’re seeing degrees of flooding on a monthly, sometimes weekly, occurrence.” The museum’s location has made it especially vulnerable. It was constructed on the site of an 1830s shipyard built by three mariner brothers, George, Clark, and Thomas Greenman. They, like other entrepreneurs in the booming seafaring community of Mystic, took over low-lying and marshy lands whose gently sloping banks and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean were opportune for shipbuilding. When the museum was established in 1929 as the Marine Historical Association, a steady expansion began, with land filled in and bulkheads added along the river. “This kind of development was happening along the entire Connecticut coast around 100 to 80 years ago,” Frost said. “Now we know that fill settles over time. Add to that the fact that we didn’t have the foresight to know about climate change and rising sea levels — areas once habitable are being forced to adapt.” Today, the majority of the campus is in a FEMA-designated flood zone. Among the highest points — at just 14 feet above sea level — are the museum’s offices, which were originally the Greenman brothers’ homes. “It’s a testament to how forward-thinking these mariners were,” said Shannon McKenzie, the museum’s vice president of watercraft operations and preservation, in a video interview. “They knew the river would be a threat long before people were concerned about sea level rise.” Flooding often submerges walkways throughout the campus, preventing visitors from accessing buildings and experiences. Some structures, especially those along the waterfront like the Thomas Oyster House — which operated in the thriving oyster distribution hub of New Haven from 1874 to 1956 and was donated in 1970 and placed on its current site on a museum pier in 1984 — also become flooded.

Many have grown to embrace the convenience of telehealth brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. But now researchers have found that taking your doctor’s appointments from the couch could have another upside: it’s good for the environment. A new study, published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Managed Care on April 22, has found the use of telemedicine could have an impact in reducing carbon emissions. The findings showed that telehealth decreased the number of cars on the road in the U.S., reducing monthly carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-powered cars. Advertisement Researchers quantified nearly 1.5 million telemedicine visits in urban and rural areas between April 1 and June 30, 2023 and estimated that anywhere between 741,000 to 1.35 million of those visits were substitutes for in-person visits. Using those calculations, they determined that telemedicine use cut CO2 emissions by a range of roughly 23,500 and 52,500 tons each month during the time studied—equivalent to the emissions produced by 61,000 to 130,000 gas powered vehicles. “The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” Dr. A. Mark Fendrick, the study’s co-senior author and professor of medicine and director of Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a press release. The U.S. health system currently contributes almost 9% of the country’s emissions, while transportation accounts for about 29%. “Our findings suggest that the environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions.” The health care system has not shied away from the need to lower its carbon footprint. Around the world, some clinics are reconsidering what items can be reused or recycled, as well as beginning to phase out an anesthetic known as desflurane, one bottle of which is equivalent to driving a gas car 2,200 miles.. Some limitations remain, however. The researchers of the new study say that, though the participants had sociodemographic characteristics that were similar to those of U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the findings may not represent the broader population or account for regional variations, such as seasonal trends or internet access. Telemedicine use has also fallen since the end of the COVID pandemic, which could have led them to overestimate the true amount of averted emissions in the future. All the same, the findings could help sway policies, researchers say, as Congress continues to debate the extension of pandemic-era flexibilities and Medicare waivers for the use of telehealth.