After months of escalating tensions between the U.S. and South Africa, President Donald Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday. Prior to the meeting, Ramaphosa expressed hopes of reaching a trade deal with the U.S., but the Oval Office sit-down proved to be a tense affair. Trump showed a video and printed news articles of what he said was evidence of the persecution of white South Africans. Ramaphosa vehemently denied allegations of a "white genocide," as he has done before. A reporter in the Oval Office asked what it would take for Trump "to be convinced that there's no white genocide” in South Africa.

Two Evangelical Christian leaders sent an open letter to President Trump on Wednesday, warning of the dangers of out-of-control artificial intelligence and of automating human labor. The letter comes just weeks after the new Pope, Leo XIV, declared he was concerned with the “defense of human dignity, justice and labor” amid what he described as the “new industrial revolution” spurred by advances in AI. “As people of faith, we believe we should rapidly develop powerful AI tools that help cure diseases and solve practical problems, but not autonomous smarter-than-human machines that nobody knows how to control,” reads the open letter, signed by the Reverends Johnnie Moore and Samuel Rodriguez. “The world is grappling with a new reality because of the pace of the development of this technology, which represents an opportunity of great promise but also of potential peril especially as we approach artificial general intelligence.” Rodriguez, the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017. Moore, who is also the founder of the public relations firm Kairos, served on Trump’s Evangelical executive board during his first presidential candidacy. The letter is a sign of growing ties between religious and AI safety groups, which share some of the same worries. It was shared with journalists by representatives of the Future of Life Institute—an AI safety organization that campaigns to reduce what it sees as the existential risk posed by advanced AI systems. The world’s biggest tech companies now all believe that it is possible to create so-called “artificial general intelligence”—a form of AI that can do any task better than a human expert. Some researchers have even invoked this technology in religious terms—for example, OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, a mystical figure who famously encouraged colleagues to chant “feel the AGI” at company gatherings. The emerging possibility of AGI presents, in one sense, a profound challenge to many theologies. If we are in a universe where a God-like machine is possible, what space does that leave for God himself? “The spiritual implications of creating intelligence that may one day surpass human capabilities raises profound theological and ethical questions that must be thoughtfully considered with wisdom,” the two Reverends wrote in their open letter to President Trump. “Virtually all religious traditions warn against a world where work is no longer necessary or where human beings can live their lives without any guardrails.” Though couched in adulatory language, the letter presents a vision of AI governance that differs from Trump’s current approach. The president has embraced the framing of the U.S. as in a race with China to get to AGI first, and his AI czar, David Sacks, has warned that regulating the technology would threaten the U.S.’s position in that race. The White House AI team is stacked with advisors who take a dismissive view of alignment risks—or the idea that a smarter-than-human AI might be hostile to humans, escape their control, and cause some kind of catastrophe. “We believe you are the world’s leader now by Divine Providence to also guide AI,” the letter says, addressing Trump, before urging him to consider convening an ethical council to consider not only “what AI can do but also what it should do.” “To be clear: we are not encouraging the United States, and our friends, to do anything but win the AI race,” the letter says. “There is no alternative. We must win. However, we are advising that this victory simply must not be a victory at any cost.” The letter echoes some themes that have increasingly been explored inside the Vatican, not just by Pope Leo XIV but also his predecessor, Pope Francis. Last year, in remarks at an event held at the Vatican about AI, Francis argued that AI must be used to improve, not degrade, human dignity. “Does it serve to satisfy the needs of humanity, to improve the well-being and integral development of people?” he asked. Or does it “serve to enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants despite the dangers to humanity?” To some Catholic theologians, AGI is simply the newest incarnation of a long-standing threat to the Church: false idols. “The presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against,” reads a lengthy missive on AI published by the Vatican in January. “AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that ‘have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear’, AI can ‘speak,’ or at least gives the illusion of doing so. Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor.”

Amid protracted negotiations between the Trump Administration and Iran over a potential nuclear deal, Israel is preparing a possible strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, multiple U.S. officials told CNN in a Tuesday report. Washington and Tehran have for more than a month been negotiating a diplomatic deal over Iran’s nuclear program. An Israeli strike on Iran could upend those efforts and also risk escalating Israel’s war in Gaza to a wider conflict in the Middle East. Officials told CNN that it’s not yet certain whether or not Israel will decide to ultimately act on its plans, adding that Israeli leaders are likely watching for how the U.S.-Iran deal evolves. The National Security Council, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not confirm the reports when asked by CNN and Reuters. “The chance of an Israeli strike on an Iranian nuclear facility has gone up significantly in recent months,” one source familiar with the matter told CNN. “And the prospect of a Trump-negotiated U.S.-Iran deal that doesn’t remove all of Iran’s uranium makes the chance of a strike more likely.” Here’s what to know. Israel appears to consider a strike on Iran U.S. intelligence reportedly intercepted Israeli communications that suggest a potential strike. That’s in addition to apparent military preparations, including the movement of air munitions and the completion of an air exercise by Israel, CNN reported, although those movements could also be an attempt to pressure Iran amid its talks with the U.S. Senior Israeli officials have on multiple occasions signalled that they are considering strikes on Iran. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X in November: “Iran is more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel.” In February U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Israel will likely attempt a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities this year. “I think it’s more likely they strike to try and get the deal to fall apart if they think Trump is going to settle for a ‘bad deal,’” one person familiar with U.S. intelligence told CNN. “The Israelis have not been shy about signaling that to us … both publicly and privately.” It’s unclear, though, to what degree Israel will be able to carry out strikes without support from the U.S., which a source familiar with the Trump Administration told CNN is unlikely to materialize without a major provocation from Iran. Iran’s nuclear facilities are deep underground and heavily fortified. An effective attack by Israel would require U.S. assistance for both mid-air refueling and munitions, according to the February intelligence report. President Donald Trump said in February that he wants a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran, which joint military action with Israel would jeopardize. “I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear. I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it,” Trump told the New York Post. “If we made the deal, Israel wouldn’t bomb them.” Trump also reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7, the same day he announced talks with Iran, that the U.S. opposed military strikes on Iran. Trump told TIME in an April 22 interview that he had not stopped Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites but that he “didn’t make it comfortable for them, because I think we can make a deal without the attack. … Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped.” But, Trump told TIME that he would be “leading the pack” in a war with Iran if a deal isn’t reached. “It’s possible we’ll have to attack because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” U.S.-Iran talks Talks between the U.S. and Iran began on April 12 in Muscat, Oman. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have met four times since, with the latest round of negotiations in Oman on May 11. Recent talks have included technical discussions that an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said were “difficult but useful,” but disagreements remain. The deal will likely involve limits to Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions on Iran, officials have said. Trump told NBC on May 4 that he is seeking a “complete dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran has rejected. Witkoff told ABC News on Sunday that Washington “cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.” Other Trump officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have made conflicting comments on the degree to which the U.S. would require Iran to dismantle its uranium enrichment. Netanyahu has publicly put pressure on the U.S. to push for zero enrichment and a complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program. “This is the clearest sign yet of how high the stakes are in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks and the lengths Israel may go to if Iran insists on maintaining its commercial nuclear capabilities,” Robert Rennie, head of commodity and carbon research for Westpac Banking Corp, told Bloomberg in reference to the intelligence reports of a potential Israeli strike. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that he does not expect talks to “reach a conclusion” and called the U.S. demand for Iran not to enrich uranium “excessive and outrageous” and a “big mistake.” Iran maintains that its uranium enrichment is part of its right to a peaceful nuclear program under the United Nations’ Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation. In a mid-March letter to Khamenei, Trump set a deadline of 60 days to reach an agreement, officials told CNN. It’s been 60 days since the letter and more than a month since talks began. Talks may continue this week in Europe, Witkoff told ABC News. History between Israel and Iran Iran and Israel have in recent decades been described as “archenemies.” But it wasn’t always that way. Iran was one of 11 members on the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 that concerned the future of the Palestinian territory after British control ended. Along with India and Yugoslavia, Iran voted against the U.N.’s partition plan out of concern that it would lead to violence in the region. The three countries instead proposed a federated state of Palestine, which would have kept the territory as a single state but with Arab and Jewish cantons. “That was Iran’s compromise to try to maintain positive relations with a pro-Zionist West and the Zionist movement itself, and also with its Arab and Muslim neighbouring countries,” Oxford historian Eirik Kvindesland told Al Jazeera. Still, in 1950, Iran became the second Muslim-majority country, after Turkey, to recognize Israel as a sovereign state following the first Arab-Israeli War in which Israel broadened its territory beyond the bounds of the U.N.’s plan and forcibly displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. At the time, Iran was ruled by Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the second shah in the Pahlavi dynasty. At the same time, Israel was pursuing its “periphery doctrine,” under which Israel sought to establish relations with non-Arab states, including Iran and Turkey, to “end its isolation in the Middle East,” Kvindesland told Al Jazeera. In 1951, however, Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh severed ties with Israel as part of an effort to nationalize oil in Iran and push out a British monopoly over the industry. Mosaddegh saw Israel as an extension of Western interests and cutting ties as “collateral damage,” Kvindesland told Al Jazeera. Mosaddegh was toppled from his seat in a 1953 coup led by the Iranian army and backed by the U.K. and the U.S. In the two decades that followed, Iran’s now pro-Western, secular government began a friendly relationship with Israel, including establishing an active Israeli embassy in Tehran in 1960, exchanging ambassadors in the 1970s, and a supply of Iranian oil to Israel. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new leadership brought about a radical shift in foreign policy towards a more pro-Islamic, anti-Western approach—and a reversal of its stance towards Israel. Iran ended diplomatic ties with Israel, rejected Israel’s legitimacy as a state, cancelled flight routes and civilian travel between the countries, and turned the Israeli embassy in Tehran into a Palestinian embassy. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera that Iran adopted a “more aggressive position on the Palestinian issue to brandish its leadership credentials in the Islamic world and to put Arab regimes allied with the United States on the defensive.” The makings of a modern conflict The two countries have engaged in proxy conflicts across the region. Iran has backed a “resistance axis” of groups including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as groups in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Meanwhile Israel has supported groups deemed terrorist organizations by the Iranian government, including Mojahedian-e Khalq and Kurdish armed groups in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has blamed Israel for a number of attacks over the years, including alleging that Israel and the U.S. were behind the Stuxnet malware attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in the 2000s, as well as alleging that Israel was behind the 2020 murder of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Israel has accused Iran of a number of cyberattacks and strikes on Israeli-owned oil tankers. After the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited Israel’s war in Gaza, tensions were brought into sharp relief. Iran has remained staunch in its support of Palestinians, early on calling Israel’s siege on Gaza an attempt to seek “genocide.” In the months since, Iran and Israel have engaged in tit-for-tat strikes. In April last year, Iran said an Israeli air strike on an Iranian consulate building in Syria had killed several officials in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. That prompted Iran’s first direct attack on Israel, with around 300 missiles and drones targeting sites in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as well as two airbases—nearly all of which were intercepted without causing damage, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel responded with a strike on a missile defence system in Iran’s Isfahan region. Iran also blamed Israel for the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Tehran last July and warned Israel of a “crushing response” after Israeli strikes killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as a high-ranking Iranian official, in Beirut last September. At the start of October last year, Iran launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to those deaths. Then-President Joe Biden said the attack appeared to have been “defeated and ineffective.” The U.S. Department of Defense and the IDF said they intercepted a majority of the missiles. Israel carried out airstrikes on military sites in Iran later that month. The October strikes have pushed Iran into its weakest military position in years, while Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza and strikes on Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria have weakened Iran’s proxies. At the heart of their escalating tensions is Iran’s nuclear program. While Israel is thought to possess clandestine nuclear weapons in its arsenal, it has insisted it will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear bomb. And with a weakened Iran and potentially dissatisfactory U.S.-Iran talks, U.S. officials told CNN, Israel could see more of an opportunity than a risk in attacking Iran.

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill could come with a big, ugly cost, economists warn. Nonpartisan research groups studying the proposal have estimated that it would add more than $2.5 trillion to the federal debt—currently at an all-time high of $36.8 trillion—over the next decade. Despite those projections, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday insisted that the bill would actually save the federal government $1.6 trillion: “This bill does not add to the deficit,” she told reporters. “It is the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.” Advertisement The $1.6 trillion figure, a senior White House official told TIME on Tuesday, reflects the cumulative savings identified by House committees based on instructions from Republican leadership—pointing to a preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that projected $1.695 trillion in deficit reduction. They added that those figures remain in flux due to ongoing negotiations. On top of those savings, the White House official pointed to a projection that the bill will generate an additional $2.6 trillion in revenue over the next ten years through increased economic growth. That, plus the expected savings more than offsets the cost of the legislation, leading to an overall reduction in deficits, says the official. Fiscal watchdogs have sharply disputed such estimates, citing the bill’s steep tax cuts—estimated at $3.8 trillion—and relatively modest spending reductions. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the House bill in its current form will increase debt by $3.3 trillion through 2034, and increase annual deficits by $2.9 trillion to $3.3 trillion. Deficits are high on the minds of a handful of Republican fiscal hawks in Congress whose wariness over the bill’s spending could doom it. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year, and simply extending them would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Republican bill also reduces taxes on tips and overtime, and increases spending on the military and border security. Republicans plan to offset that spending in part by cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and federal subsidies for clean energy projects. Republican leaders have struggled to strike the right balance of lowering the bill’s price tag while not losing support from moderates who are wary of cutting too much from widely used safety-net programs. Trump is expected to attend the House Republicans’ conference meeting at the Capitol on Tuesday to shore up support for the bill. Advertisement The bill's cost-saving measures include work requirements for Medicaid recipients, a reduction in nutrition assistance, and tighter eligibility for undocumented migrants to access federal benefits. Critics argue that these reductions disproportionately impact low-income Americans. “The structure of this bill is such that low- and middle-income households bear the brunt, while the wealthy reap significant benefits,” Daniel Hornung, a former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden, tells TIME. He adds that “there’s really no way to look at this where deficits are lower because of this bill.” Debate over the measure’s final cost has exposed rifts within the Republican Party. Fiscal conservatives argue that the bill’s spending reductions are too modest and that the promised savings are illusory. “We can and must do better before we pass the final product,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy wrote on social media late Sunday, after the House Budget Committee narrowly advanced the bill in a 17-16 vote—with four deficit hawks voting “present” so the measure could advance. Five Republican fiscal hawks on the committee had joined with all Democrats in voting against the bill last Friday. Advertisement House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team spent the weekend in frantic negotiations before passing the bill out of the Budget committee on Sunday. The bill could reach the House floor as early as this week, as Johnson has pledged to bring the bill to a vote before Memorial Day. After that, it would go to the Senate, where Republicans have their own concerns and, like in the House, Republicans will need the support of virtually all of their caucus. “The One Big Beautiful Bill will almost certainly add to our deficits and debt,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “I can’t imagine that they want Republicans to increase annual deficits. That’s why I can’t support this bill as it’s currently being discussed and doubt that it will pass the Senate.” Economists warn that the bill’s impact on deficits could be even more severe than current projections, given that the bill puts end dates on some tax cuts to keep the cost lower. Congress has a long history of ultimately extending temporary tax cuts beyond their expiration dates. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that extending the bill’s tax cuts for a full decade could push the total increase in deficits to as high as $5.3 trillion. Advertisement Fiscal hawks in Congress aren’t the only ones concerned about deficits. Moody’s Ratings recently downgraded the U.S.’s AAA rating, citing doubts about the country’s ability to maintain fiscal discipline. The bill's passage could further pressure U.S. bond yields, which have already climbed above 5%, signaling growing investor anxiety over American debt. House Republicans have insisted that the bill will stimulate economic growth, which they argue will generate enough revenue to offset the increased debt. Jason Smith, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said the economy would “go gangbusters” under Trump’s tax and regulatory agenda.

If you’re like a lot of people, you’re finding it harder and harder to stomach climate change—literally. A warming world leads to all manner of health problems, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, exacerbation of pulmonary conditions like asthma and COPD, and mental health problems including depression and anxiety. Increasingly, however, climate change is being implicated in a range of illnesses of the gut, such as diarrheal diseases, irritable bowel syndrome, intestinal infection, and more. While the mechanism behind the increase in pulmonary disease in a warmer world is more or less direct—breathing hot, dirty, sooty air isn’t good for anyone’s lungs—the gut connection is more nuanced and multifactorial, involving crop growth, contaminated water supplies, droughts, heat waves, malnutrition, and the microbiome of the soil. None of this is good for us; all of it can affect any of us. Here’s what you need to know about the climate-gut connection. How high temperatures directly affect the gut The body is an exquisitely balanced system. We operate optimally at 98.6°F; nudge us up to just 99°F and we already start feeling unwell. It’s no wonder then that if the planet runs a fever we will pay a price. “Higher temperatures can increase stress hormones in the body, and that really affects gut physiology,” says Elena Litchman, professor of aquatic ecology at Michigan State University. The principal stress hormone is cortisol, which is produced by the adrenal gland. Cortisol affects multiple parts of the body, but can have an especially powerful impact in the gut, which is lined with immune system cells; epithelial cells, which form a barrier between the intestines and the rest of the body; and enteroendocrine cells, which help regulate the hormonal environment of the gut. All of these cells have cortisol receptors, and all of them may become dysregulated if cortisol levels climb too high. Cortisol can also speed or slow the time it takes for food to transit through the intestines, which can lead to what’s known as dysbiosis—or an imbalance in the number, type, and distribution of the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that make up the microbiome inhabiting the digestive tract. High temperatures are also known to increase the permeability of the intestinal lining, leading to so-called leaky gut. “Temperature has a direct effect on the intestines,” says Desmond Leddin, professor of medicine at Dalhousie University in Canada. “One of the causes of heat stroke is thought to relate to intestinal permeability.” Leaky gut can also allow organisms that make up the intestinal microbiome—which are supposed to remain in the intestines—to migrate into the bloodstream and spread infection. The microbes that remain behind, meantime, can be thrown entirely out of balance. “When the connections [in the intestinal lining] become less tight, you can have more oxygen getting into the gut,” says Litchman. “That may stimulate bacteria or other gut microbes that are not necessarily beneficial.” The microbiome within you and without you The makeup of organisms residing in the intestines is affected by climate change in other ways as well. It’s not just humans and other animals that have a microbiome; soil, air, and water do too, and higher ambient temperatures can cause less beneficial microbes—including listeria, e. Coli, and Shigella—to thrive there. What’s in the external environment quickly becomes part of your internal one too. “Soil is a big source of microbes in the gut,” says Litchen. “The microbes are in food, they get on our skin, you can even inhale the soil microbiome in the form of dust.” In the West and the rest of the developed world, that’s less of a problem because in those wealthier countries people are eating more processed food that is further removed from the soil that produced it. In developing, often agrarian countries it’s a different matter. “People in those parts of the world are in closer contact with environmental microbiomes,” says Litchen. “There is definitely a shifting pattern in global digestive health,” says Leddin. “Of particular concern are the inflammatory bowel diseases—Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Crohn’s was relatively uncommon in lower income countries, but now it’s becoming more of a problem.” Water presents worries of its own. High temperatures may increase the concentration of pathogens in the water at the same time we’re drinking more to cope with the heat, increasing the exposure to unhealthy bugs. “It’s basically kind of a positive feedback,” says Litchen. Meantime, if we don’t drink enough when it’s hot out, we can suffer from dehydration, which has gut implications of its own. “When we’re dehydrated, blood gets shifted from muscles and the gut to the vital organs, especially the brain and the heart,” says Eamonn Quigley, chair of gastrointestinal health at Methodist Hospital in Houston. “This is not good for the gastrointestinal tract, which begins to suffer.” Digestive symptoms associated with dehydration include stomach pain and cramping, constipation, and slowed digestion and nutrient absorption. Climate change can also lead to flooding, which has a direct knock-on effect in the gut. As Leddin wrote in a 2024 paper in Gastro Hep Advances, floods can contaminate ground water with Rotavirus, Cryptosporidium, Campylobacter, and Yersinia. That hits the developing world harder than the developed one. In 2004, for example, floods in Bangladesh resulted in 350,000 cases of diarrheal disease. But even in wealthy countries, there’s a real risk. In the U.S., 23 million households rely on private wells for their water supply—wells that can become easily contaminated during floods. The role of diet As much as anything, it’s what’s on your menu that most affects your gut health, and climate change plays a big role in what you’re eating—even if you don’t realize it. For starters, higher temperatures can lead to faster-growing crops. “That sounds good,” says Leddin, “but because they’re growing more rapidly they may have a lower nutritional value.” What’s more, as Litchen reported in a 2025 paper in The Lancet Planetary Health, temperatures over 86°F can reduce the levels of beneficial antioxidants in foods, while raising the absorption of environmental arsenic by rice plants, both of which adversely affect the gut microbiome. Higher levels of carbon dioxide can reduce levels of zinc, iron, and protein in wheat, rice, and maize, which could lead to 100 million more people becoming protein-deficient and 200 million more zinc-deficient by 2050. Higher ocean temperatures may also reduce the availability of fish and seafood, lowering protein intake and changing microbiota composition, especially in low- and middle-income countries. “There is a phenomenon called ‘hidden hunger,’” Litchen says. “Basically it means that you’re consuming the same amount of food but the nutritional quality of the food changes. There are fewer nutrients and the food is harder to digest.” Direct hunger—simply not getting enough to eat, whether the food is of high quality or not—is also becoming an increasing concern as an overheated climate and extreme weather cause crops to fail, often in already disadvantaged parts of the world. “As more areas of the world become inhospitable to agriculture, the problem is only going to become greater,” says Quigley. “There’s a very nice correlation between the diversity of your diet and the diversity of your microbiome, and in terms of the gut, diversity is a good thing.” If climate change gets solved at all, no one pretends it’s going to be solved anytime soon. Last year was the warmest one on record, displacing 2023, which had briefly held that distinction, and the past decade represents the hottest 10 years ever. The planet is suffering at our hands—and increasingly, our own health is too.

Marina Silva’s achievements may seem borderline miraculous. Since taking office for a second run as Brazil’s environment and climate minister in 2023, the country has quickly and dramatically reversed deforestation trends with strict enforcement of environment rules that had been abandoned by her predecessor. According to the most recent official account released last fall, Amazon deforestation had fallen to the lowest level in a decade after dropping nearly in half from two years prior. “When we took office, we had deforestation on an ascending curve that was out of control,” she told me on April 30. “We had to rebuild institutions, command and control organizations, and increase public funding.” And yet, as we met in her office in Brasília, she was careful not to linger too long on the success. The Amazon rain forest is dangerously close to a tipping point that could rapidly reshape not just the world’s most famous rainforest biome but the whole planet. Once reached, the Amazon would lose the ability to sustain itself and vast swathes would transform into savannah, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and also a massive release of carbon dioxide. To halt it, she says, leaders will need to embrace new mechanisms to stop legal deforestation and catalyze efforts to reforest degraded land—all while continuing ongoing enforcement work. But, she says, saving the Amazon will require work beyond Brazil’s borders: the world will need to slow its burning of fossil fuels. “Even if we can nullify deforestation, with climate change, if we don't reduce carbon from fossil fuel emissions, the forest will be destroyed anyway,” she says. For Silva, who was born and raised to a family of rubber tappers in the remote Amazonian state of Acre, this is the next step on a lifelong journey of Amazon protection. But it’s also a key, potentially make or break moment as Brazil occupies the center of the climate movement this year as it hosts the annual U.N. climate conference, COP30, in November. “We're already at the limit, at the changing, shifting point of the climate crisis,” she says. “There was a window of opportunity of not shooting over the 1.5 degree limit, and now it's just a sliver.” Even a seasoned climate expert would be forgiven for struggling to track all the work happening in Brazil ahead of COP30. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula, has made climate a top priority with ministers across the government focused on tackling the issue. Silva, a national figure in Brazil who finished third in the 2014 presidential election, has turned her ministry into a central node in the effort. While I was in Brazil, the government announced a $2 billion financing program to reforest up to 1 million hectares (about the size of the island of Hawaii) of degraded land. And in recent months Silva has doubled down on work with her counterpart in the finance ministry on a $125 billion fund aimed at protecting tropical forests around the world. Beyond the rain forest work, the government has rolled out a carbon price for domestic industries—and talked about how it might work with other countries to harmonize equivalent policies elsewhere. Silva hopes that these efforts all come together at COP30 as part of a broader effort to make the conference a pivotal moment for the implementation of climate initiatives globally. She described the emerging COP30 goal as a “global ethical stocktake”: Lula and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres will hear from a wide group of stakeholders—from philosophers to Indigenous people to political leadership—with an eye to helping the world chart a plan for putting climate solutions into action. “We can't keep pushing things off,” she says. “We need to implement.” It goes without saying that this year’s climate negotiations will be rife with challenges—perhaps none more significant than the challenge posed by the U.S. pullback from the international Paris climate engagement. Silva did not mince words on the role of the U.S. and the Trump Administration in muddying global climate discussions. Without my prompting, she criticized everything from his exiting the Paris Agreement to his decision to ice the National Climate Assessment. All of that leaves a massive gap in the necessary climate action, she says: “Things have become more difficult, especially with the decisions of the Trump Administration.” My visit to Brasilia happened to coincide with a key meeting of the BRICS countries—a group of emerging market countries that cooperate as a counterweight to U.S. and European power. In my hotel, I spotted the Chinese foreign minister walking through the lobby with his entourage along with other country delegations. But Silva says the rest of the world can't replace the actions needed from the U.S. “We can't be deniers, not with geopolitics, not with climate,” she told me. “The vacuum created by the U.S. is the U.S.’s vacuum.” She pointed to challenging geopolitics, in part, to respond to questions about Lula’s own climate leadership. Despite his focus on the issue, some environmental activists have criticized him, saying he is moving too slowly and not doing enough. One area of particular concern: new oil exploration efforts in the Amazon region currently under consideration. Asked about the pending decision, Silva first pivoted to the stone-cold geopolitical realities. Oil demand remains high and supply is strained. The U.S. position has created a sense across the globe that fossil fuels will be around for a while. The solution, she says, is a well-managed transition. “What I defend is a fair transition, a planned transition for everybody,” she says. “When I say fair and planned, it's because it's not magic.” COP30, with Brazil at the helm, is a good place to start implementing such a transition. This story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content. The original article misstated the timeframe over which deforestation dropped nearly in half. It was over the previous two years, not in one year. The article also misstated the location of a reforestation program announced by the Brazilian government in April. It covered areas outside the Amazon, not in it.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday incorrectly explained what “habeas corpus” is, saying that it means the Commander in Chief has a “constitutional right” to deport people. She made the remark during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, when Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Noem to define habeas corpus. “Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the President has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Advertisement “That’s incorrect,” Hassan replied. “Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.” The exchange comes at a fraught time for the Trump Administration, as many deportation cases make their way through the courts. Several of these pending cases are based on habeas corpus, including the deportation of Venezuelan migrants alleged by the Trump Administration to be a part of the Tren de Aragua gang. Another high-profile immigration case centers on Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Maryland man was deported to El Salvador by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March, in what was initially called an administrative error. Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally years ago, but in 2019 a judge granted him "withholding of removal" status, after determining that his fears of persecution if he were returned to El Salvador were credible. The Supreme Court ordered the federal government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, but it has yet to do so. The literal meaning of habeas corpus is “you should have the body,” but as a legal principle, it gives a person the ability to challenge a detention in court. “Federal habeas corpus is a procedure under which a federal court may review the legality of an individual's incarceration,” per Congress. “It is most often the stage of the criminal appellate process that follows direct appeal and any available state collateral review.” This right also extends to noncitizens held within the United States, and in the case of those migrants who have been detained by the federal government, pending removal from the country as a part of Trump’s mass deportation plans, habeas corpus can be used to challenge. In Article I of the Constitution, it is stated that habeas corpus can be suspended only “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion [when] the public Safety may require it.” This is described, though, under the powers of Congress, not the Executive Branch.The history of habeas corpus dates back centuries to English law and is seen as a protection against arbitrary detentions by local and national governments. “The reason that habeas corpus has been designed to protect everybody is because over the centuries, people have understood that the people in power can come for you next,” says Eric M. Freedman, a professor of law at Hofstra University. “You can be in power today, and you can be an out-group tomorrow. And so the whole concept is to protect whoever is temporarily unpopular with the ruling government.”

If you’re like a lot of people, you’re finding it harder and harder to stomach climate change—literally. A warming world leads to all manner of health problems, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, exacerbation of pulmonary conditions like asthma and COPD, and mental health problems including depression and anxiety. Increasingly, however, climate change is being implicated in a range of illnesses of the gut, such as diarrheal diseases, irritable bowel syndrome, intestinal infection, and more. While the mechanism behind the increase in pulmonary disease in a warmer world is more or less direct—breathing hot, dirty, sooty air isn’t good for anyone’s lungs—the gut connection is more nuanced and multifactorial, involving crop growth, contaminated water supplies, droughts, heat waves, malnutrition, and the microbiome of the soil. None of this is good for us; all of it can affect any of us. Here’s what you need to know about the climate-gut connection. Advertisement How high temperatures directly affect the gut The body is an exquisitely balanced system. We operate optimally at 98.6°F; nudge us up to just 99°F and we already start feeling unwell. It’s no wonder then that if the planet runs a fever we will pay a price. “Higher temperatures can increase stress hormones in the body, and that really affects gut physiology,” says Elena Litchman, professor of aquatic ecology at Michigan State University. The principal stress hormone is cortisol, which is produced by the adrenal gland. Cortisol affects multiple parts of the body, but can have an especially powerful impact in the gut, which is lined with immune system cells; epithelial cells, which form a barrier between the intestines and the rest of the body; and enteroendocrine cells, which help regulate the hormonal environment of the gut. All of these cells have cortisol receptors, and all of them may become dysregulated if cortisol levels climb too high. Cortisol can also speed or slow the time it takes for food to transit through the intestines, which can lead to what’s known as dysbiosis—or an imbalance in the number, type, and distribution of the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that make up the microbiome inhabiting the digestive tract.

Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter for The New York Times, covers extreme weather. And in the United States, a huge swath of land in Earth’s middle latitudes where the forces of seasonal change clash, that means he’s very busy. “We see every natural disaster hazard the earth can throw,” Mr. Jones said. “It all exists in the U.S.” And spring means tornadoes. A series of tornadoes killed at least 28 people in the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic this past weekend. Tornadoes touched down on the Great Plains on Monday. And at least 24 people died in a three-day outbreak in the South and the Midwest in March. Mr. Jones explained the tornado phenomenon in two phone interviews on Monday. He spoke to Times Insider from Oklahoma, where he was embedded with a group of researchers looking for tornadoes to study. The following exchange has been edited and condensed for clarity. There have been several deadly tornado outbreaks this year. Is this season notable for destructive storms? It’s severe-weather season. It happens. We’re running on average for the season, in terms of tornado output. What made the weekend bad is part of a continued trend of severe weather and tornadoes occurring in populated areas east of the Mississippi River. When you think of tornado research and the “Twisters” movie, you think of tornadoes happening on the Plains, right? Texas up to North Dakota; that’s how people coined the phrase Tornado Alley. But tornadoes can happen in any state, and lately we’ve seen a trend of violent storms in more populated regions. That’s what we saw on Saturday in Kentucky. We had a similar amount of storms on Sunday in the Plains. It was more of a traditional severe-weather setup, but there are going to be fewer deaths on the Plains, because there’s less population. What are the conditions that set up a tornado outbreak, and why do outbreaks so often occur in the spring? Spring is a transition season, and the earth is always trying to get into equilibrium. As we move to the summer season, warmer air is trying to push north, and cold air is still trying to push south. You get opposite air masses fighting each other for that space. There is a combination of warm, moist air coming out of the Gulf, dry air coming out of the Southwest and colder air coming out of the Northwest. This is combined with the jet stream, air around the altitude where planes fly that can have intense winds. All of these factors are fighting against one another. How unique is the tornado phenomenon that occurs in the center of the United States? Do such outbreaks occur in other parts of the world? The setup we have in the U.S. is kind of a perfect situation because you have that moisture from the Gulf and storms forming East of the Rockies. However tornadoes happen in the middle latitudes across the world. There are more across the U.S., but some of that has to do with the fact that we track them here. Is it right to say that meteorologists still do not know how, exactly, tornadoes form? Yes, believe it or not. Meteorologists still quite don’t understand the mechanism that triggers a tornado. Why does this one storm produce a tornado but another storm with the same conditions doesn’t? Meteorologists hope to find the answer, but they may not. Weather is chaos theory. That must be frustrating for forecasters. The good news is that since the 1990s, tornado warning times have improved. Outlooks have improved. Sometimes, we can see up to eight days ahead and say if there’s a good chance that tornadoes are going to form on that particular day. We have high-resolution forecast models that allow us to draw a circle around a couple of counties and say, “In this area, a tornado will almost definitely form.” So there is more lead time, but you can still have tragic situations, like the one that happened over the weekend. There are a lot of questions over how we continue to help people. One of the things that we’re doing at The Times is trying to give people a heads-up days in advance to say, “Hey, this is a day you should watch.” Our country is full of crazy weather. As a result, sometimes weather coverage can drift toward the sensational. How do you avoid that? I want people to read my work, but I also want the audience to trust me. I feel like the best way to give information is to act as a doctor would in an office. I want to give readers the most likely scenario, but also point out the outliers. Then I want to walk away, allowing people to make their own informed decisions.

Glioblastoma, the most aggressive and deadly type of brain cancer, is known to have a very poor prognosis — but a new study suggests that a pain-relieving drug could extend survival.Researchers at Mass General Brigham have found that an already-approved medication — a pain reliever and anti-seizure medication called gabapentin — has been linked to improved survival in patients with glioblastoma. The findings were published in Nature Communications last week. MICHAEL BOLTON HAD STRANGE SYMPTOMS BEFORE BRAIN CANCER DIAGNOSIS: ‘SOMETHING’S WRONG’ Inspired by previous mouse studies that showed gabapentin’s potential in targeting tumors, the researchers studied the medical outcomes of nearly 700 patients with glioblastoma.The patients who were taking the drug survived four months longer than those who were not — 16 months compared to 12 months — which was described as "statistically significant." "Ultimately, our goal was to highlight the emerging role of cancer neuroscience in GBM progression and emphasize the importance of exploring creative strategies to therapeutically target this evolving neural-tumor axis," lead author Joshua Bernstock, MD, PhD, a clinical fellow in the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told Fox News Digital. BREAST CANCER DRUG COULD HELP PROLONG SURVIVAL FOR CHILDREN WITH BRAIN TUMORS, STUDY FINDS The team was surprised by the survival benefit, Bernstock noted. "It’s always incredible to see a hypothesis come to life," he said. "I was also really pleased to see the decrease in serum TSP-1 levels in the UCSF cohort, potentially positioning it as a biomarker of response." man puts pill in mouth