They are a group of progressive Jewish organizations and congregations, and they are coming to the defense of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Muslim graduate student at Tufts, who faces deportation after she helped write an essay critical of Israel. The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Mass., San Francisco and the Upper West Side of New York, along with J Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group. On Thursday, they filed a brief in federal court in Burlington, Vt., objecting to the tactics the government was using against Ms. Ozturk in the name of combating antisemitism. In the brief, the groups argued she should be released from the Louisiana immigration detention center where she has been held for over two weeks, after masked immigration agents surrounded and arrested her on a street near her home in Somerville, Mass. “Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” the brief says. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of amici’s members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.” There have been reports of almost 1,000 international students and scholars at universities across the country who have lost their legal status since mid-March, according to the Association of International Educators. Anecdotally, the visas have typically been revoked with little or no notice and without telling the students what they might have done wrong. In some cases, students have committed legal infractions, like speeding or driving while drunk, according to universities and lawyers that are monitoring the revocations. But some have not. If the students do not leave voluntarily, they face deportation. The Trump administration has defended the campaign, saying it is revoking the visas of students who have broken the law, who have engaged in antisemitic harassment and violence, who pose a threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States, or who are terrorist sympathizers. A few Jewish activists have applauded the effort, echoing the Trump administration’s mantra that “a visa is a privilege, not a right.” But mainstream Jewish groups have expressed qualms about the crackdown, even while approving of the Trump administration’s focus on antisemitism. As the number of students the Trump administration is targeting has grown, Jewish groups have said that while they may not like the views of pro-Palestinian students, they cannot condone students’ being swept up for vague reasons, without formal charges against them. Editors’ Picks What a New American Citizen Learned on Route 66 Simple Sandals Are Always a Good Investment Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Ms. Ozturk’s detention followed the arrest two weeks earlier of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was a spokesman for pro-Palestinian protesters. An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mr. Khalil. But he is still challenging the case in a separate court. In response to his case, the Boston chapter of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff wrote an open letter, titled “Not in Our Name,” that has been signed by nearly 3,000 faculty and staff members and students at universities across the United States. “We are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name — and cynical claims of antisemitism — to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities,” the letter reads. Sara Coodin, the director of academic affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said some federal interventions, including congressional investigations of antisemitism on campus, had been “transformative” in forcing universities to confront problems on their campuses. But she said Ms. Ozturk’s case appeared to be “a clear disregard on the part of the federal government for the rights of people on U.S. soil to speak their minds.” The only evidence that has surfaced against her is an opinion essay she co-wrote that was critical of Israel. “The idea that someone can be pulled off the street for something they wrote, something they think, really affects us all, and we all need to fight back against that,” said Elaine Landes, a member of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue in West Newton, Mass., that is one of the parties to the court brief. “The whole push to fight antisemitism, to me, feels like we’re being used for another agenda, and that is not going to keep our community safe,” she said. “We need to look out for others.” Ryan Bauer, senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco, another signatory, said he supported Ms. Ozturk even though he disagreed with her essay. In it, she pushed for Tufts to end financial ties with Israel and to recognize Israeli conduct in Gaza as a genocide. “I don’t like her statements — I think they’re wrong,” Rabbi Bauer said. But, he added, he believes in free speech, and “the beauty of America is that we don’t all agree with each other.” He said he felt so strongly that Ms. Ozturk’s detention violated Jewish values that he talked about it in a recent sermon. “When you see the floor fall out from under her, it’s naïve to think that those cracks won’t eventually reach our feet,” he said. A federal judge in Vermont, where Ms. Ozturk spent a night in custody before being sent to Louisiana, is scheduled to hear her habeas corpus petition for release from detention on Monday.

Residents across a broad stretch of the Northeast woke up on Saturday to snow blanketing backyards and frosting trees, just as the pastel colors of Easter promised that spring was near. An area stretching from around Albany, N.Y., to Maine experienced moderate snowfall, mostly from two to five inches, overnight Friday into Saturday morning, according to the National Weather Service. And while spring technically started on March 20, snowfall at this time of year is far from rare. “In upstate New York, you know, a couple inches here and there is certainly not unheard-of, even in the early spring,” said Abbey Gant, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Albany. While the Weather Service reported a trace of snow at LaGuardia Airport, there were no reports of snow in other parts of New York City. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In Maine, where two to five inches of snow had fallen by Saturday morning, Michael Clair, a Weather Service meteorologist, said that the snow was “nothing we haven’t seen before.” It’s also something the state might see again before warmer weather moves in. “It’s still too early to say we’re done for sure,” Mr. Clair said. “This is sort of what our spring looks like. It’s a mix of things.” Snow was expected to continue through Saturday, tapering off as the day progressed, before the region dries out next week, forecasters said. For Jill Woodworth, 58, who grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Orange, Mass., for the past 25 years, waking up to snow in April can be routine, but it’s still shocking. “I’ve lived in this area for most of my life, and it’s not unusual, but it’s just like, ‘Oh my God,’” Ms. Woodworth said. “It feels like it’s been a long ramp up to spring with the flowers and the trees.” Editors’ Picks How Pickle Lemonade Took Over the Group Chat Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice Living the Slop Life Ms. Woodworth said she remembered past Aprils when up to two feet of snow had fallen. This time around, she estimated that only about two inches had dusted her backyard, with no need to shovel any snow. “I’ll brush off the car, though,” she said, “before I go get Dunkin’.”

At 78, Donald Trump is the oldest American President to take office. Now he’s undergoing the first physical of his second term. On Friday, he visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a physical exam and a series of medical tests. He wrote on Truth Social on Monday that he was ready for his check-up, and that he has “never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” It is unclear how much information the White House will release from Trump’s medical exams, but according to Trump, the physical went well and a report from his doctor is due to come out on Sunday. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One after his medical appointment, Trump said: “Overall, I felt I was in very good shape. Good heart. A good soul. Very good soul. I took—I wanted to be a little different than Biden. I took a cognitive test. I don’t know what to tell you other than I got every answer right.” It's been seven years since Trump has released extensive details about his physical health. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised he would release his health information, but didn’t, departing from decades of tradition among presidential candidates. After a bullet tore through his ear-lobe during an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in July, his former White House physician Ronny Jackson—now a congressman from Texas—released a letter describing the wound to his ear. During the final two years of Trump’s first term, the White House dialed back how much information was shared publicly about Trump’s healthcare treatments. In October 2020, Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed with a severe case of COVID-19, but the White House released relatively few details about his health after he recovered from the illness. In 2019, Trump’s medical checkup was kept off his public schedule until days later, and the White House released little information about the results. The last time the public received detailed information about Trump’s health was in 2018. During a 2018 check-up at Walter Reed overseen by Jackson, Trump’s heart rate and blood work was normal. At the time, Trump was taking a statin to lower his cholesterol, aspirin, and Propecia to prevent hair loss, and he received vaccine shots to prevent pneumococcal pneumonia and hepatitis A and B. At the time, Jackson stood on the podium at the White House briefing room and took questions from reporters about the exam. Jackson said Trump had “incredible genes” but he had advised Trump to exercise more and eat healthier food. “If he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years he might live to be 200 years old,” Jackson said. Jackson wasn’t the first of Trump’s doctors to make hyperbolic statements about his health. When Trump ran for President in 2015, his personal physician Harold Bornstein put out a famously glowing assessment. Bornstein wrote at the time that if Trump won the 2016 election he would be “the healthiest individual elected to the presidency”—a seemingly unscientific flourish in a medical report. Three years later, Bernstein told CNN that Trump had dictated the letter to him. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Friday that Trump’s physician will “provide an update” after the President’s physical “in the effort of transparency.” She said the Biden White House had a “lack of transparency” when it came to describing Biden’s “health and competence” and accused reporters of engaging in a “cover up.” President Biden had repeatedly mixed up the names of countries and lost his train of thought during public remarks and had cut back on press conferences and his interactions with the press.

Afederal judge on Friday ordered the Trump Administration to submit daily updates on its efforts to bring back Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran prison last month, a day after the Supreme Court ruled the Administration must “facilitate” his return. The extraordinary demand by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis underscores mounting judicial frustration with what many legal observers view as a pattern of defiance from the White House—and deepens concerns that a long-feared constitutional crisis may now be underway. ExploreClose Subscribe Apr 12, 2025 12:52 AM IST Judge Orders Daily Updates on Trump Administration’s Efforts to Retrieve Wrongly Deported Man Politics Trump Administration Nik Popli by Nik Popli Reporter Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Holds White House Daily Press Briefing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt takes a question from a reporter during in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 11, 2025.Win McNamee—Getty Images Afederal judge on Friday ordered the Trump Administration to submit daily updates on its efforts to bring back Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran prison last month, a day after the Supreme Court ruled the Administration must “facilitate” his return. The extraordinary demand by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis underscores mounting judicial frustration with what many legal observers view as a pattern of defiance from the White House—and deepens concerns that a long-feared constitutional crisis may now be underway. Advertisement 00:00 03:00 Read More Judge Xinis issued the directive during a tense hearing in Greenbelt, Md., where a Justice Department attorney repeatedly declined to provide even the most basic information about Abrego García’s whereabouts or status. “I am asking a very simple question: Where is he?” the judge asked, according to CNN. “There is no evidence today as to where he is today,” she later remarked. “That is extremely troubling.” Xinis is requiring the government to file a sworn statement every day from an official with personal knowledge of the situation, detailing Abrego García’s location, his custodial status, and what steps—if any—are being taken to secure his return. “Even if the answer is that the government has no information, I want that on the record,” she said, according to CNN. The case has become a flashpoint in a broader battle over executive power, immigration enforcement, and the independence of the judiciary. Last week, Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego García by Monday at midnight, but Trump officials have contended that they have no power to return a man in custody of a foreign government. The Supreme Court weighed in Thursday night, ruling unanimously that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” Abrego García’s return, but it stopped short of ordering the government to “effectuate” his return—which Xinis had ordered. That distinction has become central to the Administration’s defense. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emphasized at Friday’s press briefing “that it's the Administration's responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return,” raising the question of how far the Administration will go to return Abrego García—and how quickly it would begin negotiations. “We very much appreciate President Bukele and El Salvador's cooperation and the repatriation of Salvadorian gang members who the previous Administration allowed to infiltrate our country,” Leavitt added. Bukele is scheduled to visit the White House on Monday. But legal experts say the Administration’s continued refusal to comply fully with the courts suggests a broader erosion of constitutional norms. The Supreme Court’s ruling, though a procedural win for Abrego García’s legal team, left ample room for executive branch discretion, noting that any further judicial orders must show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” The Trump Administration has seized on that language to argue that judges cannot compel the President to negotiate with a foreign government. Still, multiple lower courts have rejected the Administration’s arguments. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found unanimously that federal courts retain jurisdiction in the case, and Judge Xinis has been unambiguous in her condemnation of the government’s conduct. “The act of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was wholly illegal from the moment it happened,” she wrote in a recent order. Abrego García, 29, was deported on March 15 despite a standing immigration court ruling from 2019 barring his removal to El Salvador due to credible threats from gangs targeting his family’s pupusa business. The government has since admitted his removal was an “administrative error,” but has argued that it cannot now be compelled to bring him back—an argument dismissed by the Supreme Court’s liberal justices as both factually incorrect and legally dangerous. In a separate opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two colleagues wrote that the Administration’s position implies it could deport and imprison “any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” Further complicating matters are government allegations—unsupported by charges or public evidence—that Abrego García is affiliated with the MS-13 gang. The immigration judge who halted his removal in 2019 found no credible evidence to support that claim, and his attorneys insist he has no criminal record and was a legal worker pursuing a journeyman license in Maryland. “The government has made no effort to demonstrate that Abrego Garcia is, in fact, a member of any gang,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker. The Administration’s conduct in this case has alarmed many legal scholars, who see it as part of a troubling pattern. In multiple high-profile cases, the Trump Administration has openly resisted or slow-walked compliance with court orders. “The checks and balances are gone,” Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former assistant U.S. attorney, told TIME last month.

In an instant, President Trump landed the most significant blow yet to the post-war trade regime last week as he announced aggressive tariffs on friends and foes alike. Even after his significant backtracking, it’s clear that the system of free flowing goods across international barriers that has defined economics globally in recent decades isn’t coming back anytime soon. In the short term, we know the international tensions will disrupt supply chains for clean energy. As my colleague wrote earlier this week, many clean energy technologies are largely made in China, where tariffs now top 100%. But perhaps a more important question for long-term climate efforts is what system of global trade will emerge from the wreckage of the past two weeks—and the next three years? Trade is already an active point of discussion in climate conversations. Even as the U.S. backs out of its own climate agenda and the European Union recalibrates climate policy in the face of populist pushback, it’s possible to envision a world where climate considerations become a key focal point in trade discussions. Discussions linking climate and trade date back decades. In theory, trade restrictions represent an easy way to get over the free rider problem that keeps countries from taking aggressive action to reduce emissions. Countries that are acting on climate change can impose restrictions or fees on products from countries that aren’t making a similar level of effort. In practice, however, imposing climate-linked trade barriers has long frightened leaders who worried that they would cause geopolitical disruption. That all changed during Trump’s first presidency. As the E.U. moved aggressively to cut its emissions, industry in the bloc began to complain that climate policy—particularly the bloc’s carbon price—put European companies at a competitive disadvantage. Trump’s first term moves to hamper trade—small by today’s standards but big at the time—created an opening for the E.U. The bloc went forward with a carbon tax on imports that took effect in 2023 for large firms in select sectors. Trump is once again stomping on trade norms, and once again he has created an opening for new considerations around climate and trade. One place where that conversation has bubbled up is right here in the U.S. As Republicans search for ways to incorporate Trump’s desire for an aggressive trade agenda into a strategic vision, some D.C. policymakers have suggested that the U.S. might impose its own carbon fee at the border. Such a measure would punish China—which relies on high-emitting coal-fired power to manufacture products—with a rationale driven by both environmental concerns and economics. Even as the U.S. has neglected to enact a carbon price, its industrial base is cleaner in many sectors than those of most other countries. Earlier this week, Republican Senators Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana introduced legislation that would do just that. Backers include traditional climate advocates like Ceres, a group that works with investors and companies to push decarbonization, as well as the America First Policy Institute, a think tank that promotes Trump’s agenda. The fee “is going to acknowledge the billions, if not trillions, the U.S. has spent controlling [emissions]," Cassidy said at a Capitol Hill event highlighting the new legislation this week. “China has not, which gives them an unfair advantage.” Advertisement Cassidy suggested the U.S. could partner with the E.U. and other allies to make their border standards align—though it’s unclear how that fits with Trump’s aggressive posture to typical U.S. allies. Meanwhile, a completely different conversation is happening at the nexus of climate and trade in other parts of the world—one focused on solidarity and reciprocity rather than competition. Emerging market countries (think of India and Brazil) are furious as they assess the competitive landscape and the prospect that their products may face emissions taxes. These policies, they argue, are unfair given the historic emissions from Global North countries. Moreover, a fee on carbon harms local companies, making it harder to invest in decarbonization. Instead, they insist that countries like the U.S. should impose more stringent policies on their own emissions and help pony up the funds to incentivize decarbonization in developing countries. Advertisement This issue was a key sticking point ahead of the United Nations climate conference last year in Azerbaijan; it’s safe to assume that it will come up again at this year’s conference in Brazil. When I asked Andre Correa De Lago, the Brazilian diplomat charged with leading this year’s U.N. talks, about this, he told me he hoped multilateralism could help lead to a breakthrough. “The only way of solving important issues is through cooperation,” he said. And yet we know that the U.S. won’t be participating in the November talks in any meaningful way. At that point, Trump will only be a few short months from completing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Indeed, the newly fragmented world that Trump is creating could very well splinter climate standards and clean technology supply chains. Companies that want to play in different markets will need to adapt, investing in low-carbon technologies tailored to emerging border requirements. Advertisement It’s hard to know exactly what comes next. But it’s clear that a new trade agenda is afoot—and climate will be a part of it one way or another.

An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mahmoud Khalil, granting the government an early victory in its efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. college campuses. The ruling is far from the final word on whether Mr. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident, will be deported. His lawyers will continue their fight in Louisiana and New Jersey, arguing that he has been targeted for constitutionally protected speech. The constitutional issues at the heart of the case will most likely get a fuller hearing in federal court in New Jersey than they did in Louisiana on Friday. For the time being, the decision by the judge there, Jamee E. Comans, affirmed the extraordinary power that the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has asserted to target any noncitizen for deportation. “The department has met its burden to establish removability by clear and convincing evidence,” Judge Comans said toward the end of a hearing at an immigration court in Jena, La. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Khalil led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Columbia’s campus last year, and Mr. Rubio relied on a rarely cited law, declaring that his presence in the United States harmed the American foreign policy interest of stopping antisemitism. Judge Comans found that the government had met the burden of evidence that the law requires, which effectively amounted to a memo from Mr. Rubio declaring that Mr. Khalil’s presence in the country enabled antisemitism. The Homeland Security Department appears not to have submitted any other concrete evidence substantiating the claim, although it has not publicly released the documents it has filed in his case. After Judge Comans delivered her ruling, Mr. Khalil, who was otherwise silent throughout the hearing, criticized her harshly. “I would like to quote what you said last time, that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “Clearly, what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.” Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement. She denied Mr. Khalil’s lawyers’ requests that they be allowed to cross-examine or depose Mr. Rubio so that he could elaborate on his claims. “This court is neither inclined or authorized” to compel such testimony, she said. Judge Comans’s decision came at the end of a remarkable, nearly two-hour hearing at the LaSalle Immigration Court in Jena, La. Mr. Khalil was there in person, wearing a navy jumpsuit and holding a string of prayer beads. Most of the time was taken up by Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, who mounted arguments, both broad and technical, against Mr. Rubio’s memo and other claims the Trump administration has made about Mr. Khalil related to his immigration paperwork. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers noted that he has said in remarks on CNN that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” and that Jewish demonstrators were “an integral part of this movement.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Judge Comans was mostly calm during the hearing. She focused primarily on keeping the parties from interrupting each another while asserting that she was interested in considering only one issue: whether Mr. Khalil could be removed from the United States under the law. “I’m going to hear from the parties on removability and that’s it,” she said. She declined to allow Mr. Khalil’s lawyers to address their other requests, including to delay the hearing so that she could review the evidence. She also would not allow the Homeland Security Department to introduce new accusations against Mr. Khalil during the hearing. Homeland security officials have accused Mr. Khalil of making paperwork errors that they say bolster the case for deporting him. They say he willfully failed to disclose the extent or duration of his membership in several organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, when he applied to become a permanent U.S. resident last March. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers spent much of their time on Friday poking holes in those arguments, and Judge Comans declined to rule on the additional allegations. When Judge Comans issued her ruling, Mr. Khalil’s supporters in the room, including members of the New York City chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, began to cry. Mr. Khalil rolled his prayer beads in his hands. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Don’t worry,” he told his supporters, thanking them for being there. Marc Van Der Hout, a lawyer for Mr. Khalil, said in a statement after the hearing that “this is not over, and our fight continues. If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes.” Mr. Khalil’s immigration case now moves on to what is known as the “relief stage,” in which his lawyers will be able to argue for his right to stay in the country. If they lose, they can appeal, first to an immigration board and then to a federal court. But the free speech and due process issues that loom over the case may first be scrutinized in federal court in New Jersey, where Mr. Khalil’s lawyers are also fighting for his release. The judge overseeing that case in Newark, Michael Farbiarz, has ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the country. On Friday, Judge Farbiarz asked lawyers for the government and Mr. Khalil to brief him as soon as possible on the results of the Louisiana hearing.

The Department of Education said on Friday that it was moving to cut off all federal funding for Maine’s public schools because the state had ignored President Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams. The agency also said it had asked the Justice Department to pursue “enforcement action” against Maine, which the Trump administration has been targeting since the president picked a fight with the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, over transgender athletes in February. The administration had set Friday as the deadline for Maine to comply; last month, after a brief investigation, it declared that the state’s education system was violating Title IX, the federal law that prevents sex discrimination. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Mills has maintained that the state’s human rights law — which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity as well as religion, race and other protected characteristics — can be changed only by the Legislature, not by executive order. She has not expressed her own views on transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports publicly, though she has said it was an issue “worthy of a debate.”The Education Department said in a statement that it would “initiate an administrative proceeding to adjudicate termination” of the state’s K-12 funding, which totaled $249 million in the 2024 fiscal year. “The department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in the statement. In a letter to the Education Department on Friday, Sarah A. Forster, an assistant state attorney general, said that Maine would not agree to change its law and conceded that the two sides had reached an impasse. “Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams,” she wrote. “Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds. To the contrary, various federal courts have held that Title IX and/or the Equal Protection Clause require schools to allow such participation.”The Maine Principals’ Association, which supervises interscholastic athletics, has said that among the 151 public and private high schools it oversees statewide, there are two transgender girls currently competing on girls’ teams. Since February, the Trump administration has hammered the state with overlapping investigations of its education system. Last week, the Agriculture Department froze funding that Maine said could threaten its school meals programs. In response, the state sued the department. Not long after the Education Department’s announcement on Friday, a federal judge in Maine issued a preliminary ruling in the state’s favor, ordering that the U.S.D.A. funding be restored and issuing a warning to the Trump administration. “The Federal Defendants are barred from freezing, terminating, or otherwise interfering with the State’s future federal funding for alleged violations of Title IX without complying with the legally required procedure,” the ruling said. It was not immediately clear on Friday where the administrative proceeding on the state’s education funding would be held, or when — or whether it would meet the specifications of the court’s order. The Department of Justice is expected to sue the state to try to compel its compliance. The announcement highlighted some fundamental legal questions underlying many of Mr. Trump’s recent moves on K-12 education, including: Will the courts uphold the administration’s broad interpretation of civil rights law? And how much latitude does the executive branch have to stop the flow of federal funds that have been allocated by Congress? Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Next week, a Federal District Court in New Hampshire is scheduled to hold a hearing on whether the administration can follow through on its threat to cut off Title I funds to schools with certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Democratic-run states, teachers’ unions and progressive interest groups, like the A.C.L.U., have said it cannot, filing several federal lawsuits in response. Some education experts have predicted that the question could reach the Supreme Court.

Hearing that you smell really stinks. If somebody wrinkles their nose and tells you it’s time for a shower, or subtly slides a mint your way, you might become defensive. Yet that’s not the best way to proceed. “The first thing you should do is thank them,” says Sara Jane Ho, an etiquette expert and host of Netflix’s Mind Your Manners. Gratitude? For insulting your hygiene? That’s right. “Every time somebody tells you something, 50 people are thinking it but didn’t tell you,” Ho says. Hence the importance of uttering those two little words: thank you. Advertisement Instead of stewing over the remark, reframe it as an opportunity for self-improvement, Ho advises. It’s essential not to take the feedback personally—though she acknowledges that’s easier said than done. “This is when you really see a difference between an insecure person and a secure person, because secure people don't take critical feedback personally to their core,” she says. Those who struggle with insecurity, meanwhile, tend to get defensive, sometimes lashing out at whoever brought up their hygiene. Building self-esteem, practicing self-compassion, and seeking professional advice can help. Read More: How to Respond to an Insult, According to Therapists Like Ho, etiquette coach Akilah Siti Easter touts the power of saying “thank you” in response to hygiene feedback. If someone lets her know she might want to brush her teeth, “I actually tell them I appreciate that,” she says. “Thanks for not letting me embarrass myself in front of more people, you know?” Easter considers the fact that the person felt comfortable approaching her a sign of close friendship. “They’re trying to protect me as I’m engaging with other people,” she says. “So I say ‘thank you so much,’ and I'll probably go rinse my mouth.”

The moon is not about to change its size. Almost since its formation more than four billion years ago, it has maintained a mean diameter of 2,159.2 miles. That’s less than the distance from Los Angeles to New York. As NASA puts it, if the Earth were the size of a nickel, the moon would be about the size of a coffee bean. But that doesn’t mean the moon can’t look bigger or smaller—and this Saturday, April 12, it will be comparatively tiny, amounting to what sky watchers call a micromoon. Here’s what you need to know. On any given night, the moon can appear to change its size—sometimes dramatically. Thanks to the so-called moon illusion, it may appear especially large—sometimes huge—when it is low in the sky, hugging the horizon, and then appearing to shrink steadily as it climbs in the sky. But your eyes and, significantly, your brain, are lying. To prove it, simply stretch your arm out, close one eye, and hold your index finger up. Your fingernail and the moon will appear about the same size, regardless of how big or small the moon looks. What’s going on is a trick of the mind; at the horizon, you make an unconscious comparison between the size of the moon and the size of objects like houses and trees, with the moon appearing to dwarf them. High overhead the moon is the one that gets dwarfed by the emptiness of the sky. Your mind thus concludes that it has shrunk. The micromoon is something else. On average, the moon is 238,855 miles from Earth, but that figure changes. The moon’s orbit around the Earth is elliptical, with a low point, or perigee, of about 224,000 miles, and a high point, or apogee, of 251,650 miles. When we see the moon at perigee, closer to Earth, it naturally looks bigger—creating the phenomenon known as a supermoon, when the lunar disk appears 7% larger and 15% brighter than it typically does. At apogee—which is where the moon will be this weekend—it will appear 14% smaller and 30% dimmer, creating the illusion of the micromoon. This micromoon will also be known as a pink moon, though that has nothing to do with its color. (That’s unlike the blood moon, which occurs during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth’s shadow falls on the moon, and the blue wavelengths of sunlight streaming past our planet are scattered by the atmosphere while the red wavelengths pass through, tinting the moon.) The pink moon is just a nickname for the full moon that occurs in April, as a nod to the flowers that bloom in the season. The pink micromoon will begin rising at dusk this Saturday, reaching its greatest illumination at 8:22 PM EDT. Space enthusiasts will be looking upward then, just as they do for a supermoon. But not everyone gets so excited. As no-less an authority than astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted back in 2017: “If last month’s Full Moon were a 16.0 inch pizza, then this month’s ‘Super’ Moon would be 16.1 inches. I’m just saying.” By that measure, the micromoon will be a 13.76-inch pie. Enjoy it all the same.

The Trump Administration’s move to withhold millions of dollars allocated for family planning services is affecting reproductive health care access in more than 20 states—including some that have made efforts to protect reproductive rights. Enacted in 1970, Title X is the nation’s sole federally funded family planning program. The program doesn’t fund abortion services, but it does allocate more than $200 million annually for clinics that provide other forms of health care—including birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing—for people from low-income households. Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it is withholding funds from 16 organizations in the Title X program “pending an evaluation of possible violations” of federal civil rights laws and President Donald Trump’s Executive Order that said undocumented immigrants are barred “from obtaining most taxpayer-funded benefits.” Affected organizations received notices from HHS that their funds would be temporarily withheld while they respond to the federal government’s inquiry regarding compliance with their grant terms. Reproductive health providers have called the freeze "politically motivated.” The government’s action is threatening roughly $65.8 million in Title X funds, according to estimates by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), a membership organization for family planning providers. The association estimates that about 846,000 patients could be affected by the freeze. According to NFPRHA, clinics in 23 states have had at least some of their Title X funding frozen: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. Seven of those states—California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah—aren’t receiving any Title X dollars at all right now. Fourteen of the 16 affected organizations are NFPRHA members. Clare Coleman, president and chief executive officer of NFPRHA, says the association has heard concerns from some of them about whether they’ll be able to continue providing family planning services or even stay open if the freeze continues. “They’re going to do everything they can to stay open, to subsidize services, to keep a breadth of services, but there’s a limit to what people can bear,” Coleman says. Some of the affected organizations are based in 11 states where lawmakers have already restricted reproductive health care—Mississippi, for instance, has a near-total ban on abortion, and Utah has prohibited abortion after 18 weeks of pregnancy. “This Title X money … is life-saving for the folks who are living in these states, and now there may be no place for them to turn inside their own state lines,” Coleman says. “Then you start thinking about are people going to have to start crossing state lines to get birth control the way they do for abortion?” States that have made efforts to protect reproductive rights are not immune to the Title X funding freeze. California, Hawaii, and Maine, for instance, are all Democratic-led states that have passed various laws to protect abortion rights. “Even though California stands strongly in the protection of access to abortion and it’s in our constitution, there are other ways to undermine our ability to have reproductive health,” says Democratic Rep. Judy Chu of California, who, along with 161 other House Democrats, signed a letter sent to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 3, urging the department to reinstate all Title X funds. “Title X funding is essential for the many, many preventive elements of reproductive health.” “We are an island state,” Tokuda says. “For many of our people, transportation is a barrier, income can be a barrier.” She adds that even before the freeze, Title X funding wasn’t enough to ensure access for all. She says one island doesn’t have any Title X-funded health center at all. Now, she’s hearing from clinics that they’re “scrambling to try to keep doors open.” “Sometimes people assume that if we have broad protections for reproductive freedoms in our state, that we are fine,” Tokuda says. “[But] they’re taking away health care from our people.” Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky (PPGNHAIK), which serves those four states as well as Idaho and western Washington, was one of nine Planned Parenthood affiliates that received a notice from HHS that its Title X funding was being withheld. Its CEO, Rebecca Gibron, says that about $150,000 is no longer being allocated to its clinics in Hawaii, and a little over $1 million is being withheld from the affiliate’s clinics in Alaska. She says PPGNHAIK serves the majority of Title X patients in those states: in Alaska, Planned Parenthood clinics see nearly 3,000 Title X patients a year, and in Hawaii, they see just under 1,000. “There is no discernible pattern here around whether the Trump Administration is choosing red states or blue states—they’re attacking Planned Parenthood, and more importantly, they’re attacking the patients who rely on this Title X program,” Gibron says. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his Administration prohibited organizations or providers that receive Title X funding from providing abortion referrals. The restriction—often referred to as the “domestic gag rule”—prompted many organizations, including Planned Parenthood, to withdraw from the Title X program. The Guttmacher Institute, which researches and supports sexual and reproductive health and rights, found that the domestic gag rule, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, led to about 2.4 million fewer people receiving care through Title X in 2020 compared with 2018. Even after former President Joe Biden rescinded the domestic gag rule in 2021, Gibron says states like Alaska were still “struggling to rebuild the safety net.” Hopeful for state funds Maine Family Planning is the sole Title X recipient in the state. With Title X dollars, the organization manages more than a dozen sites, including a mobile medical unit, and distributes funds to other health centers. Maine Family Planning serves between 28,000 and 30,000 patients through the Title X program across the organization’s network of providers, says president and CEO George Hill. HHS is withholding $1.925 million from the organization at the moment, which is about 20% of its operating budget, according to Hill. Maine Family Planning is responding to the government’s inquiry, and in the interim, is relying on private funds to maintain operations, Hill says. He adds that the Maine state legislature is considering a bill that would allocate funding for family planning services, which he is hoping would help mitigate the loss of Title X dollars. But if that is unsuccessful, Hill says the organization will have to consider closing some of its clinics, including in rural communities that “quite literally are the sole source of health care for many people in those areas.” “I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” Hill says. “I think the reaction is going to be exactly what happened after [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization]: You’re going to have some states that are in better positions to support their sexual and reproductive networks, and some states where you’re going to have sexual and reproductive health care deserts.” Conflict between voters and lawmakers In Missouri, voters made history in November when they passed a ballot measure to enshrine the right to abortion until fetal viability in the state constitution (with exceptions after that if the pregnant person’s life or health is at risk). It marked the first time that a citizen-initiated ballot measure repealed a near-total abortion ban since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Despite that, anti-abortion lawmakers have been trying to block access to abortion care in the state. The state’s sole Title X recipient, Missouri Family Health Council, is one of the 16 organizations that had their funding frozen by HHS. The council’s executive director, Michelle Trupiano, says that a total of $8.5 million is being withheld from the organization, which Missouri Family Health Council would have distributed to clinics both in Missouri and Oklahoma. (Some organizations receiving Title X money distribute funds to clinics in multiple states.) “Without this funding, if it goes much longer, we are at a critical point where we see health centers that are going to be closing their doors,” Trupiano says. She says her team has been communicating with health centers about contingency plans, but that “business as usual” will likely last only a few weeks. Even if centers remain open, some of them won’t be able to offer a sliding fee scale anymore, which will make services unaffordable for many patients who now visit clinics through the Title X program, Trupiano says. “The health centers are already and they have for years been working on what we would call a shoestring budget,” Trupiano says. “Any freeze in funding, any cuts to funding, is detrimental to their ability to stay open because they were already working at a deficit.” She says that, on top of the Title X freeze, many health centers are experiencing other public health funding cuts. Unlike providers in other states, Trupiano doesn’t anticipate that Missouri lawmakers will help make up for the Title X funding freeze; she says the state legislature generally hasn’t been supportive of reproductive health care. “There’s a disconnect from what voters want, what people want, what they’re consistently saying they want, and yet what policymakers are actually prioritizing,” Trupiano says. ‘On our doorstep very shortly’ The day after the Title X funding freeze went into effect, Planned Parenthood of Michigan (PPMI) announced that it was permanently closing three of its health centers in the state, effective April 30, and that it would be consolidating two health centers in Ann Arbor by May 5. Paula Thornton Greear, president and CEO of PPMI, says the affiliate hasn’t received a notice from HHS that its Title X funding would be withheld, but that the organization expects that it will arrive “on our doorstep very shortly.” She says the prospect of the Title X freeze, in addition to other threats to health care, such as the possibility of states barring Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program, forced PPMI to “make these heart-wrenching decisions in order to ensure the long-term sustainability” of the organization. “We’ve been contingency planning for months in anticipation of the Trump Administration coming and really taking what they did in 2019 to a whole new level,” Thornton Greear says. “The complexity and the layered approach of this is devastating, and that’s why we were forced to make the decision.” PPMI said it plans to expand its virtual health services over the next few months, including by offering telehealth seven days a week to provide services like birth control, medication abortion, and gender-affirming care. In 2022, voters in Michigan passed a ballot measure to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. “In Michigan, the constitutional protections that we have for reproductive freedom—that’s absolutely crucial. It ensures that we can keep providing the full spectrum of reproductive health care without state level interference,” Thornton Greear says. “That’s a lifeline that many of our colleagues in other states simply did not have.” “However, here’s the reality: these constitutional protections don’t shield us from federal funding cuts,” she says. “While we can legally provide abortion care in Michigan, the ability to maintain affordable access across our services still depends heavily on programs like Title X, like Medicaid. The ballot measure protects the right, but not necessarily the accessibility or the affordability.” Many reproductive rights experts believe this Title X funding freeze is just the beginning of further federal cuts to family planning and reproductive health services. “Everybody needs to be doing contingency planning,” Coleman says. “Everybody now needs to be concerned that they may lose their Title X, whether it’s for a time or whether it’s for all time.” And experts fear that additional cuts will result in people who need health care services the most being left out of the system. “Health care disparities in this country are not new, but right now, we’re facing an Administration that wants to take a widening gap of health care disparities and turn it into a chasm that can never close,” Thornton Greear says. “For every dollar that is stripped away, we’re going to lose people.”