The longest eight days Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams ever spent turned out to last more than nine months. On June 5, 2024, the two NASA astronauts launched aboard the maiden mission of Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft for what was supposed to be a short shakedown cruise to the International Space Station (ISS), before turning around and heading home after just over a week. A veteran of two long-duration station rotations, Williams had spent a cumulative 322 days in space before her June launch. While to all appearances she has always thrived in her off-planet work, she was excited about this planned quickie mission. “We want to go and get back as quickly as possible so they can turn our spacecraft around and also take all those lessons learned and incorporate them into the next Starliner,” she told TIME in a conversation before launch. But that was not to be. Thruster problems and helium leaks aboard Starliner led NASA to conclude that the spacecraft was not fit to carry the astronauts home. Instead the ship left the station and splashed down uncrewed, leaving Wilmore and Williams to join the station rotation, living and working aboard the ISS until a fresh SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft arrived to take them home. After much anticipation, that ship docked with the station on March 16 and the two astronauts climbed aboard for an ocean landing later today, March 18, a full 278 days after they were originally scheduled to depart the ISS. So what kind of emotional adjustment did Williams and Wilmore have to make as they went from overnight guests to long-term residents aboard the station? And what will the reacclimation to life on Earth be like after so much time away from home and family—and for that matter from sunshine, fresh air, and the simple fact of gravity? Ever since the first astronauts and cosmonauts went aloft, they’ve been having to make that through-the-looking-glass transition between terrestrial and extraterrestrial living, and the results have been sometimes comical, sometimes surreal. In 1965, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell spent a then-record two weeks orbiting Earth in their Gemini VII spacecraft. Lovell recalls being belowdecks aboard the recovery vessel USS Wasp shortly after splashdown and being evaluated by a NASA psychologist. Lovell was drinking coffee and had a spoon in one hand. Meaning to put it down, he instead simply released it a foot above the table, leaving it to fall with a clatter. The psychologist looked at him curiously, and Lovell just shrugged. After a fortnight in zero-g he was accustomed to letting go of objects in mid-air and having them accommodatingly float where they were. In 1971, astronaut Dave Scott had a more otherworldly experience. The commander of Apollo 15, Scott walked on the moon, returned to Earth, and a few days later was feted by his neighbors at a welcome-home cookout. Standing in his back yard, wellwishers circulating, he looked up at the sky where a bright moon was shining. “A week ago,” he thought incredulously, “I was there.” Before Wilmore and Williams make the adjustment of returning to Earth, of course, they had to prepare themselves for leaving it in the first place, and that was a process they were at least partly denied. Training for a long-duration space mission is equal parts physical and mental and it’s that mental piece—saying goodbye to all earthly people and things for half a year or more—that they missed out on, instead training for just an eight-day mission. That comes at a price. In 2015, TIME visited Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the documentary series “A Year in Space,” about astronaut Scott Kelly’s near 12-month stay aboard the ISS. Just two days before Kelly launched from Baikonur, TIME spoke to astronaut Jeffrey Williams, part of the back-up crew, who would have flown in Kelly’s place if he were unable for some reason to go. He confessed that if that day, 48 hours before liftoff, Kelly was suddenly scratched from the flight, it would be a challenge for him to get up to speed mentally since there is simply no substitute for having fully and wholly prepared for the actual fact that he would be leaving Earth for a year. Retired astronaut Mike Massimino, a veteran of two shuttle missions, says that missing family was likely the hardest mental challenge Wilmore and Williams faced. “Although they love their jobs and are grateful for the opportunity, there still is the heart tug of being away from home for so long,” he says. Still, to all appearances at least, Wilmore and Williams quickly fit into the ISS life cycle—at least if NASA livestreams of the pair at work both inside the station and during spacewalks were any indication. “Suni has just oozed such joy for the past eight months,” says retired astronaut Marsha Ivins, a veteran of five space shuttle missions and a friend of both Wilmore and Williams. “It’s infectious to watch her.” “We came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short,” Wilmore said in a recent air-to-ground press conference. “That's what we do in human space flight.” “All career astronauts know the risks involved in human spaceflight, long or short duration, and they accept those risks when they strap into the rocket for launch,” says Ivins. “A large part of our training is to learn to deal with the unexpected, the off-nominal, the contingency scenarios, and still get the job done.” Coming home will present different challenges. “The toughest thing about returning to Earth after many months in space is adapting to gravity,” says retired astronaut Terri Virts, a veteran of two space flights, including one long-duration stay as ISS commander. “The grueling rehab program NASA put me through was key to my quick adaptation back to my planet. The first few days weren’t fun, but I was religious about doing my daily workouts and I was back to driving and normal daily life much more quickly than I expected.” The mental part—as Apollo 15 Commander Scott experienced—is critical too. “It’s important to get back in ‘Earth mode’ from a psychological perspective,” says Virts. “For me, it was like a light switch: one day I was living in space, and as soon as I got back to Houston, I was just back to my normal life. It’s really important to have goals and things to look forward to down here, as you may or may not get another chance to fly in space.” It’s way too early to say if Wilmore or Williams will fly again or whether their extended stay aboard the ISS will be their last trip off the Earth. Astronaut Peggy Whitson holds the U.S. record for most cumulative days in space, at 675. Williams is now in the number two spot at 608 days, and Wilmore has logged a very considerable 464. That might be more than enough for any mortal—astronaut or not. If Wilmore and Williams indeed step away from space, they will do so having distinguished themselves in, as Ivins puts it, the most off-nominal of missions. “Suni and Butch accepted the unexpected extension to their mission with such grace and humor,” she says. “Their demonstration of flexibility, adaptability, and optimistic versatility in folding seamlessly into the on-board crew is exactly what one should hope for from a career astronaut and makes me even more proud to call them my friends.”

In July 2024, Chief Justice John Roberts penned one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of President Donald Trump’s political career. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, Roberts and the court’s conservative majority established that Presidents can enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts—a decision that provided Trump with a crucial legal shield as he campaigned to return to the White House. The ruling effectively delayed one of Trump’s most serious criminal cases related to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election, contributing to the political landscape that allowed his re-election bid to thrive. But on Tuesday, after weeks of silence, Roberts took a markedly different stance. In a rare move, he issued a public statement pushing back against Trump’s escalating attacks on federal judges who have ruled against his Administration—just hours after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over a ruling blocking a key deportation policy. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts wrote, according to the Associated Press. His words, measured but firm, represented a striking contrast to his previous willingness to bolster Trump’s legal arguments. The moment highlighted the complex and sometimes contradictory role Roberts has played in Trump’s political and legal battles. As the leader of the judiciary, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2005, he has, at times, enabled Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power. Yet, as Trump’s attacks on judges have grown more incendiary, Roberts appears increasingly compelled to push back. Here’s what to know about Chief Justice John Roberts and his complicated relationship with President Donald Trump: A history of enabling Trump's legal shield Roberts’ tenure as Chief Justice has coincided with some of the most tumultuous legal battles involving a sitting President. Despite his reputation as an institutionalist committed to preserving the court’s legitimacy, Roberts has frequently authored or joined opinions that benefited Trump’s political and legal standing. In 2018, he cast the decisive vote in upholding Trump’s controversial travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries. More recently, in March 2024, his court issued a unanimous decision blocking state-level efforts to bar Trump from the ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause—a ruling that secured Trump’s path to renomination. But no decision was more consequential than last year’s ruling on presidential immunity. By siding with Trump’s argument that former Presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for official acts, Roberts’ court delayed legal proceedings that could have put Trump on trial before the 2024 election. The decision drew sharp criticism from legal experts who warned that it effectively placed the presidency above the law, granting future occupants of the office unprecedented protection from accountability. Trump, for his part, appeared to recognize the significance of the ruling. As he exited a joint session of Congress earlier this month, cameras captured him warmly thanking Roberts. “Thank you again. Won’t forget it,” the President said. While Trump later insisted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he was referring to Roberts’ role in swearing him in as President, the moment fueled speculation that the President saw Roberts as an ally in his legal battles. A rare rebuke to Trump's judiciary attacks Despite his past decisions aiding Trump’s legal defenses, Roberts has also taken pains to push back when Trump directly undermines the judiciary’s independence. His statement on Tuesday was not the first time he has publicly criticized Trump for attacking judges. In 2018, after Trump dismissed a federal judge as an “Obama judge” following a ruling against his asylum policy, Roberts issued an uncharacteristically direct response. “We do not have ‘Obama judges’ or ‘Trump judges,’ ‘Bush judges’ or ‘Clinton judges.’ What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them,” he said at the time. Trump dismissed Roberts’ latest statement on Tuesday night during a Fox News interview. “He didn’t mention my name in his statement,” Trump said of Roberts, suggesting that he could have been referring to other people who have called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached. Prior to Roberts’ intervention, Trump called Boasberg “a Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama,” after he blocked his Administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants. A judiciary under siege in Trump's second term As Trump’s presidency unfolds, the courts remain one of the few institutions capable of checking his expansive use of executive power. Since taking office again in January, Trump has pushed an aggressive legal agenda that has triggered a flurry of lawsuits. His Administration’s frequent losses in lower courts have seemingly fueled Trump’s attacks on the judiciary, with some conservative allies in Congress introducing articles of impeachment against multiple judges, including Boasberg. Impeaching a judge would require 67 votes in the Senate, which means Republicans and Democrats would both have to support it. Roberts, as the head of the federal judiciary, has been facing mounting pressure to protect the courts from political interference. With a lifetime appointment, it remains to be seen whether the 70-year-old Chief Justice will take further steps to defend judicial independence as Trump continues his broadsides against the judiciary.

From December 2024 to February 2025, the effects of human-induced climate change were evident in nearly all regions of the world, new analysis from Climate Central has found. The report, which examined how climate change influenced temperatures around the world over the past three months, found that about one in five people globally—or 1.8 billion people—experienced temperatures that were strongly influenced by climate change every single day. And in half of the analyzed countries, and 287 cities around the world, the average person experienced temperatures strongly influenced by climate change for at least one-third of the three-months. The findings come as the planet breached 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures last year—a critical threshold that nations were striving to avoid under the Paris Agreement. “We found that there were warmer than normal temperatures caused by climate change almost everywhere around the planet,” says Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central. This January ranked as the warmest in the 176-year global climate record, according to data from the U.S. National Oceanic and and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Temperatures in Europe, Canada, South America, Africa, and much of Australia and Antarctica were above average, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Within the same three-month period analyzed, about 394 million people experienced 30 or more “risky heat days.” These are defined as days where the local temperature was hotter than 90% of daily temperatures observed between 1991-2020. Risky heat days are “associated with a temperature threshold that carries additional risks for human health,” says Dahl. “Above that temperature, you start to see increased heat related mortality.” In February, parts of Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United Republic of Tanzania all saw temperatures soar during a heat wave. Hospitals in Uganda reported an increase in heat-related illnesses, including dehydration and heat stroke, according to local news sources. The research showed that a high number of risky heat days is far more common in the Global South: 74% of people who experienced 30 or more days of risky heat lived in Africa, while those living in Brazil, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea also saw 30 or more risky heat days. “[It] really reinforces something that we see consistently with climate change, [which] is that the people who have contributed the least to the problem are often disproportionately exposed and impacted,” says Dahl. In the U.S., around 45% of cities analyzed experienced average temperatures that were normal or warmer-than-normal, while 14 cities, mostly in the west, experienced at least three weeks’ worth of days where average temperatures were twice as likely to be impacted by climate change. “These [findings] are just the latest reminders that climate change is happening here and now it's not something of the future,” says Dahl. “People are experiencing it every day in their lives around the world.”

I had already interviewed Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, for his new book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” when President Trump accused him of being “a Palestinian” who was “not Jewish anymore.” A few days later, Schumer decided to postpone his book tour after joining Republicans to support a stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown — one that would have played straight into Trump’s hands. Furious progressives were threatening a demonstration at every stop. Derided by the MAGA right and yelled at by the far left? Outside of Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s hard to imagine a more Jewish place to be. As Schumer told it in his modest Brooklyn apartment over gluten-free cookies (and disquisitions about digestive issues), he’s been in that place most of his adult life. The son of an exterminator, he went to Harvard in the fall of 1967 and quickly got involved in antiwar politics. But never as a student radical. “I didn’t like the left taking over buildings,” he told me, adding he believed in working through the system, not against it. Student militants “didn’t want to debate; they wanted to call people names.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Harvard was also the place where Schumer first saw left-wing antisemitism in action — using the cloak of anti-Zionism, as it often does today. At a 1970 campus speech by the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, students in the gallery unfurled a banner that read, Fight Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s book recalls Eban’s reply: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery,” Eban said. “Every time a people get their statehood, you applaud it. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that is the Jewish people.” The double standard — whether it was about who could work in what profession or move to Moscow in the Czarist empire, or who could have a state — was the essence of antisemitism.It’s notable, and politically gutsy, that Schumer’s book devotes plenty of space to exposing leftist antisemitism, including calling out congressional colleagues like Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He also calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a U.C.L.A. rally screaming, “Beat that fucking Jew” next to a piñata bearing the likeness of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or a masked thug at Columbia telling Jewish students that “the seventh of October is going to be every day for you.” Does Schumer worry that his party is tilting in an anti-Israel direction — one that will, at its edges, also tilt into antisemitism? “My caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he insisted to me, noting that when the Senate last year voted for “the largest package of aid to Israel ever, I only lost three Democrats,” including Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. But he also warned that “the greatest danger to Israel, long-term, is if you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On one of Netanyahu’s previous visits to the United States, Schumer told me he urged the prime minister to “go on Rachel Maddow and not just Sean Hannity.” Netanyahu ignored the advice, and Schumer, in a Senate speech, later called for new elections to replace him, for which he remains “fiercely proud.” It showed Democrats, he said, that it’s possible to oppose Netanyahu while championing the Jewish state. “My job,” he told me, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Then there’s right-wing antisemitism. Just as some anti-Israel demonstrators use the word “Zionist” as a substitute for Jew, corners of the right have also had their own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.” Trump’s dig at Schumer’s Jewishness was of a piece. “There’s a long and dark history of non-Jewish people trying to decide who gets to be Jewish,” Schumer told me in a follow-up on Monday. “Maybe President Trump should spend less time trafficking in bigotry and focus more on rooting the antisemites out of his administration.” That would include people like the Pentagon deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, whose obsessions include relitigating Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia, or Amer Ghalib, a Michigan mayor who’s Trump’s choice as ambassador to Kuwait and who appears to have liked a Facebook post referring to Jews as “monkeys.” Where does this leave American Jews today? “My worry as an American Jew,” he told me, “is a pincer, from the right and left, who would cohabit in strange and dangerous ways.” That has happened before: In France in the 1890s during the Dreyfus affair, in Germany in the 1920s in the run-up to the Third Reich. Could it happen here? Schumer insists he wrote his book with a “nervousness rather than a pessimism,” because the roots of America’s warmth toward Jews run deep. But as he also points out, citing the Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, “antisemitism is a light sleeper.” When I mentioned to some friends that I had read and liked Schumer’s book and was going to write a column about it, they kvetched that the New York Democrat had let them down on one issue or another. Then again, where today is the sitting G.O.P. senator, representative or governor willing to call out the bigotries on his own side? Did John Thune defend his colleague in the face of the president’s slander? A Jew stands up for his people regardless of the cost, and regardless of the politics of it. On this, Schumer has acquitted himself bravely.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Education Department to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Judge Julie R. Rubin of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland said in an opinion that the department had acted arbitrarily and illegally when it slashed $600 million in grants that helped place teachers in underserved schools. The judge also ordered the administration to cease future cuts to those grants. The grants fund programs that train and certify teachers to work in struggling districts that otherwise have trouble attracting talent. The programs cited goals that included training a diverse educational work force, and provided training in special education, among other areas. The department, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, argued that the grants trained teachers in “social justice activism” and other “divisive ideologies” and should be eliminated. A coalition of educator organizations sued to stop the Education Department from terminating the grants. The coalition included groups, such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, whose members depend on the grants at issue. The judge found that the loss of the federal dollars would harm students and schools with the fewest resources. “The harms plaintiffs identify also implicate grave effect on the public: fewer teachers for students in high-need neighborhoods, early childhood education and special education programs,” she wrote. “Moreover, even to the extent defendants assert such an interest in ending D.E.I.-based programs, they have sought to effect change by means the court finds likely violate the law.” In early February, schools involved in the programs received a letter from the Education Department notifying them that the grants had been canceled as part of the agency’s initiative to “eliminate discrimination in all forms of education throughout the United States.” The grants, made through the Supporting Effective Educator Development, or SEED, program and the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, among others, are competitive for the states and school districts seeking the assistance. The grants also help states set up specialized college programs to train educators with the goal of placing them in schools where literacy rates or performance gaps are deemed key issues. For example, last year, Miami-Dade County received a nearly $10 million grant to set up a partnership between Miami Dade College and Miami-Dade County Public Schools through which the college would help train 180 teachers to “break the cycle of teacher shortages” and help prepare future educators for work in high-need schools over five years. In another case last year, Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where Ms. McMahon previously served on the board of trustees, received nearly $3.5 million to enroll around 20 teaching residents per year, who would team up with mentors and help staff local schools facing teacher shortages. The grant noted a focus on “emphasizing outreach to recruit teachers of color.” The preliminary injunction issued on Tuesday also covered the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program, which provided performance-based financial incentives for teachers and principles who were able to close achievement gaps in high-need schools. It stopped short of a nationwide injunction, but required the department to reinstate the funding that was previously awarded to any members of the groups behind the lawsuit. Taken together, Congress had appropriated well over $200 million to fund the three programs in past years. The continuing resolution, passed last week, provides less clarity than a full budget on specific grant programs, giving the Education Department more discretion in how to spend congressionally appropriated funds.

When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams embarked on Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5, 2024, they expected to be away from home for just over a week. Instead, they spent around 9 months in orbit on the International Space Station. But after over 286 days, their extended stay in space is finally coming to a close, as the two astronauts make their way back to Earth on a SpaceX capsule that’s set to splash down off the coast of Florida on Tuesday. Wilmore, 62, and Williams, 59, are both veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots. Williams became an astronaut in 1998 and Wilmore in 2000. The two were the first crew aboard what was meant to be a quick test flight for the Starliner. But the vessel was plagued with problems that almost prevented it from making it to the ISS, including a helium leak and thruster malfunctions. NASA ordered the Boeing capsule to return unmanned in September, while Wilmore and Williams were left aboard the space station awaiting a safe flight home. At the end of January, President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blamed the Biden Administration for delaying the astronauts’ return—which former space station commander Andreas Morgensen called “a lie.” Musk claimed in posts on X that SpaceX offered to bring Williams and Wilmore home months earlier, but that it was denied for “political reasons.” (Former NASA officials said no offer was made to the space agency, and former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the decision to wait until February for the stranded astronauts to return home rested on safety procedures). In August, NASA decided to bring them back on a SpaceX capsule. The Dragon-9 vessel launched in September but remained docked at the ISS while waiting for a relief crew. That relief mission saw hold-ups: the scheduled flight was meant to launch in February but was delayed due to battery work on the SpaceX capsule. A hydraulics issue delayed another launch attempt last Wednesday with a new SpaceX capsule. On Friday, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Crew-10 mission to orbit with four astronauts aboard a SpaceX capsule that arrived at the ISS on Saturday to relieve Wilmore and Williams. Such a long time spent in space can take a physical and mental toll, but Wilmore and Williams’ expedition isn’t the longest spaceflight. Five previous American astronauts—including the U.S. record-holder Frank Rubio as well as Peggy Whitson, who has spent the most cumulative days in space for an American astronaut—have spent more days in space on a single mission. And Russian cosmonauts hold the worldwide records for both consecutive and cumulative days in space. World’s longest single stay in space: Valery Polyakov Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov set the world record for the longest single spaceflight in history in 1995, spending 437 days, 17 hours, and 38 minutes in space and orbiting the Earth 7,075 times, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Having studied astronautical medicine at Moscow’s Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, Polyakov became an asset to the study of the effects of space on the human body. At the age of 46, he launched to the Mir space station aboard Soyuz TM-6 on Aug. 29, 1988—16 years after becoming a Soviet cosmonaut in 1972. He was accompanied by fellow Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Lyakhov and Abdul Ahad Momand, Afghanistan’s first astronaut. While the rest of his crew returned to Earth just a week later, Polyakov stayed on to monitor the health of cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov, who endured the first year-long spaceflight. After Titov and Manarov returned to Earth in December 1988, Polyakov remained on Mir for another four months to await two new crewmembers. Polyakov ultimately returned to Earth in April 1989, marking more than 240 days in space, according to the Moscow Times. For his record-setting second mission, Polyakov was aboard Mir for 14 months, beginning on Jan. 8, 1994. Across 25 experiments and investigations, he studied the physical and cognitive functions of rotating crews from Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, and the U.S. On March 22, 1995, Polyakov boarded the Soyuz TM-20 spacecraft, alongside Aleksandr Viktorenko and Yelena Kondakova, to return to Earth. U.S. longest single stay in space: Frank Rubio With 371 consecutive days spent in space, Salvadoran American astronaut Frank Rubio broke the record for the longest spaceflight by an American and the longest time spent aboard the International Space Station. He landed in Kazakhstan on the morning of Sept. 27, 2023, more than a year after leaving Earth. Rubio was launched into space on Sept. 21, 2022, aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-22—his first mission since becoming a NASA astronaut in 2019. The mission was initially expected to take six months, but the spacecraft suffered a coolant leak, forcing the trip to be extended. Russia’s space agency sent an uncrewed Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft to bring home Rubio and his crewmates, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. Rubio’s time in space spanned 5,963 orbits of the Earth and more than 157 million miles. He beat the previous record for an American astronaut of 355 days set by Mark Vande Hei. World’s longest total time in space: Oleg Kononenko Another Russian cosmonaut holds the record for total time spent in space. Oleg Kononenko became the first person to log a total of 1000 days in space last June—an equivalent of 33 months. Kononenko broke the previous record of 878 cumulative days in orbit set by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka. His time in space spanned 16 years, five ISS expeditions, and 16,000 orbits around the Earth. U.S. longest total time in space: Peggy Whitson Whitson, 65, has broken several records over the course of her astronautical career. In 2017, she broke the U.S. record for the longest cumulative time spent in space of 534 days set by NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, and has held the record since, accumulating 675 total days. She also holds the record for the longest cumulative and consecutive times spent in space for a woman of any nationality, and became the first female commander of the ISS in 2008—and the first woman to command it a second time in 2016. She has flown on three long-duration missions with NASA, and one flight with Axiom Space. Williams moves just behind Whitson notching a total of 608 cumulative days in space after her third spaceflight. (Wilmore, meanwhile, will have spent a total of 404 cumulative days in space across his three spaceflights.)

President Trump on Tuesday escalated his campaign to discredit judges who get in his way, calling on Congress to impeach the judge at the center of a legal fight over the deportation of hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador. Trump’s brazen assault on the judicial branch drew an unusual rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Posting on his website TruthSocial, Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered Trump to halt his use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants suspected of belonging to transnational criminal gangs. Despite the judge’s order, administration officials let the deportations continue in apparent defiance of the court, and flights carrying 261 people removed from the U.S. landed over the weekend in El Salvador, where the Salvadorian government says they have been imprisoned. Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic” and “a troublemaker and agitator.” He also mocked the idea that a federal judge could constrain his actions as President. “He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE,” Trump wrote. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Within hours of Trump's post, Roberts issued a rare public criticism of a sitting President. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote in a statement, according to the AP. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Roberts has previously warned of the problem of judges facing threats and intimidation, including writing about the issue in his year-end report in December. “Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed,” Roberts wrote. Boasberg was appointed as a federal judge by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in March 2011. He became the chief judge of the District Court of the District of Columbia in 2023. Earlier in his career, Boasberg worked as a U.S. attorney specializing in homicide prosecutions and President George W. Bush appointed him in 2002 to the D.C. superior court as an associate judge presiding over civil, criminal and domestic violence cases before being named to the federal bench. Only Congress has the authority to remove a federal judge, and the process is similar to how Congress can remove a President. First the House must vote to impeach a judge, which would require a simple majority. If that succeeds, then the Senate holds a trial and votes whether to convict. A conviction requires two thirds of the votes in the Senate to pass. In the past 250 years, Congress has impeached 15 federal judges, and the Senate has convicted only eight of them, according to a tally by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The most recent federal judge to be removed from office by Congress was G. Thomas Porteous, Jr., a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Porteous was convicted by the Senate in December 2010 on charges of accepting bribes and making false statements under penalty of perjury. ​​Rep. Brandon Gill, a Republican from Texas, posted on X Tuesday that he planned to file articles of impeachment against Boasberg in the House. House Republicans have either threatened to file or filed articles of impeachment against at least four other federal judges who have ruled against Trump since he took office on Jan. 20.

Senate Republicans had gathered for one of their regular private lunches last Wednesday when Rand Paul commanded their attention. As Senators sipped diet sodas and grazed on sandwiches, the Kentucky lawmaker went through a slide deck with charts and statistics in service of a bold proposal: come out against President Trump’s tariffs. The arguments in Paul's presentation, which has not been previously reported, were not a surprise to his audience. One of the most prominent libertarians on Capitol Hill, he’s a fierce proponent of free trade. But his attempt to corral colleagues against the Trump trade agenda was seen as a provocation to the President’s close allies. “The public feels like free trade has sold us out,” Paul said, according to two Senators who were present, “but Americans are richer because of it.” Claiming that free trade agreements have spurred upward social mobility, one of his slides asserted that the middle class has shrunk in recent years only because more people had moved into the upper class. “Basically, he was saying that everyone was getting richer during Joe Biden’s presidency,” one Senator tells TIME. For some in the room, Paul’s rebellion reflected their deep unease over Trump’s protectionism, which has rattled stock markets, shaken consumer confidence, and strained America’s relationships with its allies. Economists now fear the U.S. is heading into a recession. But for many others, it was heresy. Tariffs are not only a Trumpian fixation, they were one of his core campaign pledges and a bedrock of his plan to reshore manufacturing jobs back to the United States. To that end, Paul was asking them to undermine the President, a political suicide mission given Trump's grip over the GOP base. Among Congressional Republicans, Paul has been more recalcitrant than most. He refused to endorse Trump in the 2024 election. He was the only GOP Senator to vote against the Trump-backed government funding bill last week. While tariffs are anathema to plenty of Republicans who preach the gospel of unfettered markets, Paul is one of the only members of Congress currently speaking out against them. “When the markets tumble like this, it pays to listen,” he recently wrote on social media. Behind the scenes, he’s been even more aggressive, courting members of Congress to join his renegade mission. This makes Paul an anomaly. At a time when most elected Republicans are either America First true-believers or traditional conservatives who have bent the knee, Paul has emerged as a thorn in Trump’s side. “They have very different ideologies,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP strategist. “Rand Paul is a libertarian and Donald Trump is a populist, and they have very different views about appropriate policies given those two different ideologies.” Paul isn’t the only Republican to push back on Trump. His fellow Kentuckian Mitch McConnell has voted against some of the President’s cabinet picks, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But it’s easier for McConnell than the rest; he’s retiring at the end of this term. Other GOP Senators who have dipped their toes in the opposition have eventually acquiesced under pressure. Sen. Joni Ernst and Sen. Thom Tillis each expressed reservations about Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary. But after an onslaught of social media harassment and abuse—combined with the threat of a Trump-endorsed, Elon Musk-funded primary challenger—they both voted to send Hegseth to the Pentagon. In some ways, Paul has been less obstreperous than them. He voted to confirm nearly all of Trump’s cabinet nominees and rhetorically sought to smooth the waters last month. “A few people may have noticed that I resisted an enthusiastic endorsement of Donald Trump during the election,” Paul wrote on X. “But now, I’m amazed by the Trump cabinet (many of whom I would have picked). I love his message to the Ukrainian warmongers, and along with his DOGE initiative shows I was wrong to withhold my endorsement.” The detente didn’t last long. He has since become a vigorous antagonist of Trump’s stiff tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, which the President insists will galvanize an American industrial renaissance. Trump and Paul have a history of acrimony. When they each sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Trump opened one of the first debates by ridiculing his rival. “Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage,” he said. “He’s got one percent in the polls and how he got up here—there’s far too many people up here anyway.” Paul dropped out five months later. The two also have ideological disagreements. Paul is an intellectual disciple of the so-called Chicago School of Economics, most associated with Milton Friedman, which argues for laissez-faire economic policy. Trump, for his part, has ushered in a wave of national populism, with protectionist policies as a pillar of his economic agenda. He has called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Tariffs may not be as beloved by all Republicans, but Trump has cobbled a right-wing coalition together by tethering his trade posture to a classic business-friendly program of cutting taxes and regulations. The mass movement he leads has also effectively captured the GOP, which operates in service to him. In the other Capitol chamber, House Republicans recently relinquished their own authority when it comes to trade, voting earlier this month to block their ability to challenge levies imposed by the President. The Trump Administration’s trade war could hit Paul’s constituents hard. After Trump announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the United States, EU nations threatened last week to slap a 50% tariff on American whiskey, putting Kentucky bourbon in the crosshairs of a global trade war. (Trump struck back hours later by threatening a 200% tariff on European alcohol.) While Paul has little influence on the President, he does have a connection in the White House. One of Trump’s top policy advisers, Sergio Gor, used to be a spokesman in Paul’s Senate office. Sources close to Trump expect Gor to serve as an intermediary if Paul’s vote becomes crucial to securing an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Paul, along with a handful of other Senators, have expressed doubts about adding to the national debt. Paul’s misgivings haven’t yet resulted in an impasse. But with Republicans holding a slim 53-seat Senate majority, that remains a future possibility. And if the tax bill creates a confrontation between the two, it may not be the last. By resisting parts of the Trump agenda, Paul may be setting himself on a collision course for 2028, when he’s up for reelection. “The thing about Trump,” says a senior GOP Senate aide. “He has a very long memory.”

In the last two months, Elon Musk has inserted himself into a range of government functions on the grounds that he and his team, the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), have an urgent mandate to root out “government waste.” In the early rollout, Musk’s team claimed to see fraud everywhere: he reported that FEMA was sending migrants to “luxury hotels” and reposted a claim that USAID is “basically a form of money laundering.” And in a recent interview with the Fox Business Network, he announced, “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — most of the federal spending is entitlements — that’s the big one to eliminate.” Entitlement spending includes Medicaid, Medicare, and, of course, Social Security. Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a direct accusation that support for the benefit is for chumps. He seems to be laying the groundwork for a full-scale assault on the most popular redistributive program in America with a line of thinking that society is, well, for suckers. Sharing, cooperating, promise-keeping, and helping—that kind of earnestness is for losers, not leaders. Musk purports to believe that many federal functions, especially within agencies like the EPA, the Department of Education, and even the FBI, harbor freeloaders at every turn. In February, he demanded that federal employees email DOGE with an accounting of what they had accomplished in the previous week, posting on X, “The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.” He has made the same claim about deceased Social Security beneficiaries, apparently based on a misunderstanding of the underlying coding, according to reporting by WIRED. On the one hand, many of the boldest claims appear so easily refutable that the whole campaign may be destined to implode. But I have been thinking about and studying the social science of feeling scammed for almost two decades, and I know that the emotional efficacy of sucker rhetoric distorts our moral and political reasoning. Even when the accusations are unfounded, even when the risks are small, the mere possibility of being a sucker can be psychologically potent enough to undermine a rational preference for cooperation. It is all too easy to convince people that compassion and integrity are illusory—that, as historian Anne Applebaum wrote in 2018, in Trump’s America “morality is for losers.” Understanding the rhetorical power of warning Americans that they are being played for suckers, at a personal and visceral level, was part of the winning strategy of the 2016 Trump candidacy. He held himself out as the voice of reason who could see humane asylum policies and international cooperation for what they really were: traps for the unwary. Now the appeal of that rhetoric is being put to a new test. Psychologically, the fear of being a sucker is a distinctly aversive feeling. Most people are so acutely attuned to the threat of feeling duped that even minor scam risks can contaminate their decision-making, both in terms of everyday financial and social decision-making, and also at the level of their core values and deeper goals. Trust is risky, and there is ample evidence from social science that the risk of being conned sparks a special risk aversion. People will go way out of their way to avoid even the suggestion that they are about to play the fool. In a famous study from 2011, research participants shown a promising startup company were willing to gamble a lot when the 5% downside risk was due to overestimating market demand, but willing to invest much less if that same 5% downside risk was the small chance that the founders were “fraudsters.” Same risk, different psychological resonance, and perhaps why Trump and Musk’s deployment of that sort of language is so effective. Most of us recoil, or retaliate, at the first suggestion that we might be taken advantage of; as threats go, the warning that you’re a sucker works. Since he came into office last month, Trump has gone after a range of vulnerable targets. Whatever you think about the rightness or competence of the underlying missions, the human harm has been real and widespread. Patients have been turned away from lifesaving medical intervention abroad; American government and university workers are losing their jobs; visas are being revoked. Real people, with lives and obligations, are suffering. We might think, or hope, that Musk and Trump are overplaying their hands. Billionaires targeting workers, refugees, and SSI recipients—the optics ought to be terrible. But the relentless search for scammers coming from marginalized groups has a reliable psychological appeal. One of the core insights of Trump’s populism is that he seems to see how the sucker rhetoric is tied to status anxiety. There is an extra humiliation, and thus an extra threat, to being suckered by someone you think should be below you on the social ladder, behind you in the line for promotion or priority seating. (“If they can put one over on me, what does that make me?” the thinking goes.) Trump’s obsessive policing of who’s the sucker has given him political clout with a populace trained to be vigilant to the prospect of being scammed—even by the least plausible fraudsters. In the meantime, scammy behavior by rich men is routinely coded as “savvy” instead of grotesque. So it invites the question: who’s conning who right now? The line between the helper and the pawn is easily manipulated. All it takes is some vague warnings about government waste and suddenly paying your taxes means you’re a dupe; after a few headlines about 150-year-olds on Social Security, a modest retirement benefit looks like a reward for cheating the system. But that whole framework is wrong. It is tempting to respond to Musk’s numbers with direct refutation (no, DOGE has not saved taxpayers 115 billion dollars), but it’s better to refuse the premise altogether. We can support government efficiency and nonetheless insist that it is destructive to approach our most important cooperative ventures with rank suspicion. Living in a society requires trust, and with that trust comes some vulnerability. Alleviating human suffering is the right goal for a government to have. And Social Security, a self-funded program that keeps millions of American retirees out of poverty every year, achieves widespread good with remarkable efficiency. The fear of playing the sucker is often weaponized for political ends, but it can only cover so much real harm, and right now, real harm abounds. One laid-off IRS worker—a Trump supporter himself—described the juxtaposition to NBC10, the sucker’s stakes versus the human stakes. “You know, when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it. I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing.” So far, though, all he sees is a billionaire “coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.”

The Trump Administration appeared to openly defy multiple court orders over the weekend, deepening concerns among Democrats and legal experts that the constitutional crisis many feared when President Donald Trump was elected has now arrived. On Saturday, federal officials ignored an order from Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who had directed the government to turn around deportation flights carrying Venezuelan detainees. Instead, the planes continued on their course to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, boasted that the 238 detainees would be held for at least a year in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center. “Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele wrote on social media, a post later amplified by White House officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed gratitude to the Salvadoran president, pointedly ignoring the judge’s ruling. A day earlier, in Boston, a similar scenario played out. A federal judge had issued a restraining order to block the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical professor with a valid visa returning from a family visit to Lebanon. Despite the order, she was deported anyway. Taken together, the incidents suggest that the Trump Administration is increasingly willing to brush aside judicial authority in pursuit of its policy goals. It follows a pattern in which Trump and his allies have sought to test the limits of judicial power, sometimes circumventing rulings, other times attacking judges outright. The country is “far beyond” a constitutional crisis, says Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former assistant U.S. attorney. “A constitutional crisis is the accumulation of unchecked power in one branch. We’ve seen now for weeks the Trump Administration ignoring acts of Congress,” says Wehle, noting that the President has ignored Congress’ constitutional power of the purse by withholding federal funds and by terminating federal employees and senior officials without cause. Other legal scholars, while alarmed, hesitate to label the administration’s actions as an outright crisis. Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, describes the administration as challenging the courts thus far up to a point. “I don’t want to call it a constitutional crisis because I’m waiting to see them say in their own words, ‘We will not comply with court orders anymore,’” says Frost, who is the director of UVA’s Immigration, Migration, and Human Rights Program. “They have yet to say that. And while they’ve done some things to violate corners of the margins, they have so far followed along.” She adds, “I’m very concerned and think they’re being very disingenuous…but I would not say that they have yet crossed the line of suggesting they no longer feel that they need to abide by the rule of law.” Yet signs of open defiance are emerging. White House officials have said the judge’s order came after planes carrying the Venezuelan migrants had already left the U.S. Tom Homan, Trump’s White House “border czar,” dismissed the weekend’s rulings, telling Fox News on Monday that the court orders had come too late to make a difference. “We’re not stopping,” Homan said. “I don’t care what the judges think.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked to clarify those comments Monday afternoon, insisted that the Administration is complying with the court order, even though the planes with Venezuelan deportees landed in El Salvador hours after the judge gave verbal instructions to Justice Department attorneys that the flights must return to the U.S. “We are quite confident in that, and we are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court,” Leavitt told reporters. She also said there are “questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order.” Federal judges are now weighing how to respond to cases that may end up before the Supreme Court. Judge Boasberg scheduled a Monday evening hearing to determine whether the administration defied his ruling. In Massachusetts, Judge Leo T. Sorokin has demanded an explanation from the government for why Dr. Alawieh was deported in apparent violation of his order. The Administration says it invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a wartime law rarely used in modern history—to deport Venezuelans who the government say belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, without due process. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration’s use of emergency powers, including on immigration and border security, yet officials have continued to push forward in ways that some see as ignoring or undermining the judiciary’s authority. In the case of Dr. Alawieh, who is Lebanese, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that she “openly admitted” to CBP officers her support for a Hezbollah leader and attended their funeral. “A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” the statement said. “This is commonsense security.” The official White House account on X said: “Bye-bye, Rasha” with a hand waving emoji. Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon, even though the judge ordered on Friday that she be kept in the U.S. and brought to a court hearing on Monday. Legal scholars warn that if courts allow such defiance to go unpunished, the judiciary’s ability to serve as a check on executive power could be permanently weakened. “There is an accumulation of power in one place,” Wehle says. “That means Donald Trump becomes the law. The law is what he sees the law to be. He picks and chooses winners and losers.” The Trump Administration is working aggressively to shape public perception of both the deportations and its defiance of the courts as wins for the American people. Social media posts from administration officials and pro-Trump influencers have celebrated the deportations. One post showed a video of shackled men being led onto the planes, accompanied by Semisonic’s 1998 song “Closing Time.”