Amanda Zurawski never set out to be an activist. But in 2022, when she was four months pregnant after years of trying, her life changed forever. She dilated too early, her water broke at just 18 weeks, and suddenly, her pregnancy was in distress. Zurawski’s doctors told her “with complete certainty” that she would lose the baby. If Zurawski, now 37, had lived in another state, or in another time, her doctors would’ve been able to give her standard medical treatment, in this case an abortion. She would’ve been able to heal and go on to have a healthy pregnancy. But Zurawski lived in Texas in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Her water broke the same week that Texas’ trigger law went into effect, banning abortion in almost all circumstances. Because her fetus still had a heartbeat, her doctors could not treat her miscarriage. “I had to wait until the baby died inside me or for me to be on death’s door before I could get care,” she says. She went into septic shock and was hospitalized for a week. “Now my reproductive organs are permanently compromised,” she says. After sharing her story publicly, Zurawski became the lead plaintiff in the Center for Reproductive Rights’ lawsuit challenging Texas’s abortion ban. That lawsuit, Zurawski v. Texas, inspired others around the country. Zurawski became the face of the abortion-rights movement, and her story became one of the most prominent examples of the dangers abortion bans pose to women’s health. In May 2024 the Texas Supreme Court upheld the ban. The decision felt like “a slap in the face,” Zurawski recalls. “It felt like they were trying to take away our voices, erase us from history, and silence us.” Zurawski refused to back down. She made dozens of campaign trips for President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris over the course of 2024, warning about the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to reproductive justice. After Harris lost, Zurawski was devastated. But she didn’t let herself wallow for long. “The anti-choice movement would want us to be tired, they’d want us to rest,” she says. “It’s not in my nature to give up. It can get worse, and it will, if we don’t continue to fight.”

Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry has a new passion: menopause, a neglected area of medicine long in need of a little love. Doctors often downplay or fail to thoroughly treat the biological changes that trigger physical, emotional, and social shifts at midlife, and Berry is asking hard questions about why the medical community doesn't adequately address this important stage with patients. Berry talked to TIME about her advocacy work and Respin, the new company she created to provide women with reliable and comprehensive information about menopause. You’ve become a vocal advocate for more research and information about women in midlife. How did your personal experience bring you to this work? The more I started to talk about what I was going through, I started to realize how other women were suffering and how little other women had. I started to see the need to continue efforts in Washington to get a bill passed with substantive dollars [for more research on midlife and more clinical trials for menopause]. I saw the need for more education. I had no answers, no one to turn to. I was floored to find the dearth of nothingness in this space—and how little doctors knew. I thought I had the best doctors I could have. Holiday inbound tourism thrives Branded Content Holiday inbound tourism thrives By China Daily How are you working to change how we talk about menopause? We are working on the federal level to get the bill through, and working at the state level, too, with governors and leaders. We’re talking to them about what programs they might be willing to support in their states to support women. Why are more doctors not talking to women about menopause and midlife? It’s not really their fault. It’s not something that’s made important for them in medical school. But what I hold against doctors today is that now that we are out there talking about it—and screaming that women deserve better—they don’t go back to take it upon themselves to get an education. Every practitioner should know about the menopausal body. Women are living to their 80s, and menopause can start in your 40s. We spend half our lifetimes in it now. Read More: Why It’s Time to Uncouple Obstetrics and Gynecology If men went through this time of life in the same horrific way we do [with symptoms of hot flashes, night sweats, and mood changes], there would be lots of answers, research, and a lot of money raised to fund studies to help men live their best lives. But because we are women, we suffer sexism and ageism; when we get to this time of life, we’re expected to white-knuckle it and bow out gracefully. Because society told us our primary and best years are for childbearing, and all we are meant to do is make babies. When we are done making babies, we’re left to fend for ourselves. No one cares about us any more. You have testified in Congress on behalf of a bill that would increase research and clinical trials to better understand women’s midlife. Why is there so little funding for this work? We refuse to understand that menopause is a thing. It's a very important time in a woman’s life when she needs to be cared for and understand what is happening to her body so she can live her best life in the next 30 years. We haven’t acknowledged that, and that’s why we never support it with money. How can women change the current stigma and lack of knowledge about menopause? There are so many ideas and information and misinformation swirling around. That’s why I created Respin. It’s a community for women to talk to each other and learn from each other. But there is also a health component with health coaching, nutritionists, and experts to talk about exercise and learning how the lack of estrogen and changing hormones affect our heart, brain, bones, and entire body. I felt like there was something really missing in the market for women in midlife. How will Respin help women in menopause? Women can get whatever level of support and care they need. A woman in her 30s can get educated about menopause; a woman in perimenopause can get a health coach and devise a plan for her needs, whether that includes hormone replacement therapy or supplements, and a woman post-menopause can come for the services she needs, too. It all depends on where a woman is and what her needs are when she enters the community. Read More: Menopause Is Finally Going Mainstream How can the medical system change to be more supportive and knowledgeable? That’s my next crusade. After I get the bill passed in D.C. for more research and clinical trials, I’m going to the universities and putting pressure on them, too. We need to help them understand why this is important and reimagine their curriculum to make menopause and midlife for women more than one chapter in medical-school textbooks. And this isn’t just for gynecologists. This isn’t bikini medicine. Every doctor—every cardiologist, every neurologist, every general practitioner, every rheumatologist—should understand the effect that a woman’s loss of her hormones does to her body and every single one of her organs. We women have to start demanding more. That’s who I am today: a woman demanding more. I am demanding more because we deserve more.

Geopolitics has found a new battleground: on ice. The U.S. and Canada men’s ice hockey teams, set to play in the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament final on Thursday night, have come to represent more than just their athletic skill. On both sides of the border, the rivalry in the rink has been seen by some as an extension of the political tensions between the once-friendly allies. As President Donald Trump has incensed Canadians with tariff threats and talk of the nation becoming the “51st” U.S. state, fans at a previous game between the neighbors on Saturday in Montreal booed during the playing of the U.S. national anthem, which has become an emerging trend. “We’re not booing your hockey players. We’re not booing your country. We’re not even booing you,” a Canadian fan posted on X. “We’re booing [Trump] who keeps threatening our sovereignty for zero reason. Once he leaves us alone it’ll stop.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was in attendance, also posted a clip of the crowd standing and boisterously singing the Canadian national anthem, captioning the post, which some saw as a dig at his American counterpart, with the anthem’s closing words, “We stand on guard for thee.” The antagonism wasn’t kept to just the stands: players scuffled three times within the first nine seconds of playing time in the game, which ended in a 3-1 victory for the U.S. The U.S. players involved in the brawls said they simply wanted to send a message—“It’s our time”—to their sporting rivals. But both the violence and triumph were celebrated by Trump supporters online. “AMERICA IS BACK,” proclaimed pro-Trump social media influencer Philip Anderson. “Mr. President, we are still not sick and tired of winning!” posted author Nick Adams. Bill Guerin, general manager of the U.S. team, said Tuesday on Fox News about the Saturday game: “I think there was a little bit of a political flare to it. It’s just the time that we’re in. I think our guys used that as inspiration.” He added that he would welcome Trump to attend the championship game on Thursday. “We’re just trying to represent our country the best way we can,” Guerin said. Trump responded on Truth Social on Thursday, saying he wouldn’t be able to make it to the game but that he’d call the U.S. team “to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.” Saturday’s game was the most-viewed non-Stanley Cup final telecast since 2019, ESPN said, and Thursday’s final is certain to crank up the intensity. The 4 Nations Face-Off is a new best-on-best tournament—featuring top National Hockey League players representing the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Finland—replacing this year’s NHL annual All-Star game. Historically, Canada has won the past three—and nine of all 13—best-on-best tournaments, according to the NHL, while the U.S. has won once by defeating Canada at the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. The tournament’s round-robin games, which began on Feb. 12, have been played in Montreal and Boston. Canada and the U.S., who each won twice and lost once, will go head-to-head again, this time in Boston, for the final on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, airing on ESPN and streaming on Disney+.

In his first month in office, President Donald Trump and his Administration have taken a number of actions affecting abortion and reproductive healthcare access, both within the United States and internationally—and reproductive rights advocates worry that more is still to come. Trump has publicly expressed his anti-abortion views, but he was vague during his most recent presidential campaign about the specific moves he would make on abortion, sidestepping questions about whether he would veto a national ban if it crossed his desk. However, reproductive rights activists, medical providers, politicians, and legal experts feared and expected that his Administration would curtail access to abortion, as well as other reproductive health services. Mary Ziegler—a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law with an expertise in abortion—says that some of the actions the Trump Administration has taken so far on the issue are “part of the standard playbook for Republican presidents.” She adds, “There’s a sort of pendulum that swings back and forth depending on whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House.” At the same time, Ziegler says Trump has taken some of these actions a step further, such as when his Justice Department said that it would be curtailing prosecutions against anti-abortion protesters accused of obstructing access to abortion and reproductive health clinics. While the Administration has already taken several significant steps on abortion, Ziegler says, “we’re still in kind of a wait and see mode” for others. “He didn’t ask day one for Congress to pass and deliver to his desk an abortion ban, [but] no one should take comfort in that,” says Nancy Northup, president and chief executive officer of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “This Administration is going to be the most anti-abortion Administration that we’ve ever seen in U.S. history, with no backstop of federal constitutional protection. The steps that he’s taken so far do reveal that it is going to be a vibrant anti-abortion agenda.” Restoring a city’s charm Branded Content Restoring a city’s charm By China Daily Here are the major moves the Trump Administration has made so far affecting reproductive healthcare access. What has the Trump Administration done to affect access domestically? In his first week in office, Trump pardoned several anti-abortion protesters convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law meant to protect abortion clinics and their patients by prohibiting people from physically blocking or threatening force against patients. A day later, a top official in Trump’s Justice Department issued a memo that said prosecutions against people accused of violating the FACE Act will now “be permitted only in extraordinary circumstances” or in situations where there are “significant aggravating factors,” effectively ordering the department to curtail such prosecutions. Under former President Joe Biden, the Justice Department pursued cases against dozens of people accused of violating the FACE Act. While Ziegler says many expect that the law won’t be enforced as rigorously under a Republican president, this announcement takes it a step further by openly declaring that the department won’t be prioritizing these cases. Read More: The Powers Trump’s Nominees Will Have Over Abortion Northup says that six of the people who were pardoned by Trump’s order had been convicted last year of violating the FACE Act, after they had blocked patients from entering a Michigan reproductive healthcare clinic that the Center for Reproductive Rights represents. “This is sending a clear signal to anti-abortion extremists that the Trump Administration will turn a blind eye to the type of blockades and violence and threats of violence that women have to go through to get access to the clinics, and that clinic staff have to deal with on a daily basis,” Northup says. Also in his first week in office, Trump signed an Executive Order committing to enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion. The order revokes two Executive Orders that Biden had signed during his presidency—one that encouraged the government to widen and protect reproductive healthcare access, and another that categorized abortion as healthcare. Northup accuses Trump of slipping anti-abortion sentiment into other policies he’s enacted in his first month in office. She points to the Executive Order the President signed that proclaimed that the U.S. will only recognize “two sexes, male and female.” “That [order] obviously both guts access to gender-affirming care, which is of deep concern, but also in that Executive Order itself, it embedded personhood language because when it talked about there being a policy of the United States to recognize two genders, they basically said that a person begins at conception,” Northup says. “They are sneaking into all federal policy this notion of personhood beginning with a fertilized egg as opposed to all rights and privileges that begin at birth.” Reproductive rights advocates say that Trump and his Administration have made their anti-abortion views clear. Soon after Trump was sworn in, reproductiverights.gov, a federal website launched under the Biden Administration that shared information about abortion and reproductive healthcare, went dark. That same week, Vice President J.D. Vance gave an in-person speech at an annual anti-abortion rally, March for Life, in Washington, D.C., calling Trump the “most pro-life American President of our lifetimes” and praising the actions Trump took on abortion in his first presidential term, crediting him for the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. While Trump didn’t appear at the rally in person, he gave a pre-recorded video address, in which he promised to support anti-abortion protesters. What has the Administration done to affect access internationally? Experts say that one of the most significant actions Trump has taken in his first month affecting access to reproductive healthcare globally is the Administration’s freeze on foreign aid. The U.S. government provided more than 40% of all humanitarian aid that the United Nations tracked during 2024, and is the largest single aid donor in the world. For the 2024 fiscal year, Congress appropriated $575 million for family planning, in addition to $32.5 million for the United Nations Population Fund, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which researches and supports sexual and reproductive health and rights. Elizabeth Sully, principal research scientist at the Institute, says that level of funding has generally received bipartisan support and has been stable for nearly a decade. Because of the Helms Amendment, which bars using foreign assistance to fund abortions, that money wasn’t going toward abortion care, Sully says. According to a recent Guttmacher analysis, those funds can provide 47.6 million women and couples with contraceptive care every year and prevent 17.1 million unintended pregnancies, which can save the lives of an estimated 34,000 women and girls who, without that care, could have died from pregnancy and childbirth complications. “Family planning is a life-saving intervention,” Sully says. But with the freeze, international family planning programs receiving U.S. aid have been forced to halt services, and the Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 3 million women and girls have been denied contraceptive care so far as a result. The Guttmacher Institute predicts that, over the course of the full 90-day review period, about 11.7 million women and girls will be denied contraceptive care, leading to 4.2 million women and girls experiencing unintended pregnancies, and 8,340 dying from pregnancy and childbirth complications. On Feb.13, a federal judge ordered the Trump Administration to temporarily lift the suspension of foreign aid, but the Administration’s lawyers are defending the freeze, arguing that the judge’s order doesn’t prevent the State Department from suspending foreign assistance programs. At this point, it’s unclear if the judge’s order will lead to the resumption of foreign assistance programs. “What’s so hard right now is the unpredictability of all of this,” Sully says. “You can go to a clinic now that maybe you’d been to before, and that’s where you’d been receiving your injections or your contraceptive pills, or you were talking with a provider about an IUD, and you show up to that clinic now and its doors are closed, or there’s no commodities in stock, and no one can tell you when to come back.” Dr. Sierra Washington, director of Stony Brook’s Center for Global Health Equity and a member of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics’ Committee on Safe Abortion, practices medicine in Mozambique. She says the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provides a lot of care in Mozambique, and that the impact the freeze will have “keeps [her] up at night.” She worries the freeze will lead to a resurgence of HIV, rise in unsafe abortions, and an increase in maternal mortality. “It’s just a matter of weeks before we’ll start to see real impact on shortages in condoms and contraceptives starting to plague the entire health system, and that just means we’re going to see more women dying of unsafe abortion and dying of unsafe delivery,” Washington says. “It’s just a real tragedy.” “I don’t believe that [Trump Administration officials] understand how interrelated we all are, and that condoms … actually prevent the spread of HIV, and that HIV doesn’t really respect international borders,” she continues, adding that a rise in HIV prevalence could “reach the American border and will permeate throughout the world.” Also in his first week in office, Trump reinstated the Global Gag Rule, which prohibits foreign organizations receiving U.S. aid from providing, referring to, or discussing abortion care. Many reproductive health experts anticipated the move, since it’s a policy often enacted by Republican presidents and rescinded by Democratic ones. During Trump’s first term in office, he expanded the order to apply to any global health funding distributed by the U.S., not just ones specific to family planning services, which Sully says had “far-reaching impacts” beyond abortion care. The Guttmacher Institute found that in some regions in Ethiopia and Uganda, the previously seen trend of increased contraceptive use came to a halt or even reversed course after the first Trump Administration enacted the Global Gag Rule. “Its supposed intended aim is abortion, but when you have declines in family planning, you have more people who end up having unintended pregnancies, and you actually have more abortions,” Sully says. The Trump Administration also announced that the U.S. was rejoining the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a non-binding pact the U.S. had joined toward the end of Trump’s first term that promotes anti-abortion policies and has garnered support from more than 30 countries, including Uganda and Hungary. Biden withdrew the U.S. from the declaration when he took office. Sorry, the video player failed to load. (Error Code: 104153) What could Trump do next? Most experts TIME spoke to agree that the Trump Administration will continue to take steps curtailing abortion and reproductive healthcare access. One of the most pressing issues experts are watching is what actions the Administration will take on mifepristone, a drug that was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for abortion purposes more than two decades ago but has recently been unsuccessfully challenged in court by a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations. During his confirmation hearings to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave vague responses when asked about mifepristone, saying only that the President asked him “to study the safety” of the drug but “has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it.” Ziegler says it’s hard to say if the Trump Administration would revoke the FDA’s approval for mifepristone entirely, or if it would roll back Biden-era policies that made the drug more accessible, including allowing it to be prescribed via telehealth and received by mail. Either move would have a significant impact on abortion access nationwide; Northup says that access to medication abortion through telehealth and mail has been a “lifeline” to many patients in a post-Dobbs America. Read More: How the Biden Administration Protected Abortion Pill Access—and What Trump Could Do Next Experts are also waiting to see if the Department of Justice will use the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law, to ban the mailing of abortion pills. Looking further down the line, Ziegler says that Trump will likely continue to appoint conservative federal judges, as he did in his first term, who can have a major impact on abortion laws, now that many state-level restrictions are being fought in court. It can take time for Trump to pick judges and get them confirmed, let alone the years it can take for cases to be filed and work their way up through the court system, so the impact may not be immediate, but it could be considerable. “Those judges will be making decisions that impact access to abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, all kinds of reproductive health services,” Ziegler says. “Over time, the more the courts are transformed, the more, I think, explosive kinds of outcomes we can see on reproductive issues.” Some expected the Trump Administration to make even more dramatic moves on abortion soon after the President was sworn in. Part of the holdup may be because Trump and his Administration could have “some trepidation” about taking dramatic steps if Trump is trying to appeal to both the majority of Americans who support abortion rights and his anti-abortion supporters, Ziegler says. Sully also notes that, “Trump took office right away, but we’ve had to wait for confirmations for a number of leaders of these departments” who would oversee many abortion-related policy changes, including on mifepristone and the Comstock Act. Read More: Why Abortion Rights Won in Three States That Voted for Trump Advocates maintain that people should be concerned about what’s to come. Northup points out that Roe was in effect throughout Trump’s first presidency, offering a “really important protection” that restricted what steps his Administration could take on abortion. Now that Roe has been overturned, that constitutional right guaranteeing abortion access and limiting his authority is no longer in place, Northup says. “Everybody who cares about access to abortion care—and that is the strong majority of people in the United States—should be on red alert for what this Administration will do to try to cut off access in those states where abortion is still legal,” Northup says.

A slew of nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration on Wednesday in response to its Executive Orders targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. The case was filed by the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and Lambda Legal on behalf of the National Urban League, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. The lawsuit—titled National Urban League v. Trump—alleges that the Trump Administration is infringing on the organizations’ right to free speech and due process by forcing said organizations to adopt the Trump Administration’s view regarding DEI. “Beyond spreading inaccurate, dehumanizing, and divisive rhetoric, President Trump’s Executive Orders seek to tie the hands of organizations, like our clients, providing critical services to people who need them most,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of LDF, in a press release. “The three orders we are challenging today perpetuate false and longstanding stereotypes that Black people and other underrepresented groups lack skills, talent, and merit—willfully ignoring the discriminatory barriers that prevent a true meritocracy from flourishing.” The lawsuit comes after the Trump Administration filed three Executive Orders in January that called for an end to all federal DEI and asked agencies to lay off the staff working on such initiatives. Online information pages on the sites of numerous federal agencies mentioning diversity initiatives have been removed. And, per NPR, the National Park Service removed any direct mention of “transgender” from its history page on the Stonewall Uprising. Interestingly, the lawsuit is not the first of its kind questioning the constitutionality of the anti-DEI Executive orders. The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, the American Association of University Professors, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore also previously filed a lawsuit against Trump on Feb. 3. In both cases, plaintiffs argue that the federal funding they rely on to engage with underserved communities and provide social and health services has been compromised. “The terms of the Executive Orders are extraordinarily vague and could prohibit Plaintiffs from engaging in any targeted effort to help a specific group of people facing unfair disadvantages. said Wednesday’s case filing. “Without any discernible standards or criteria of what is and what is not ‘dangerous, demeaning,’ ‘immoral,’ and ‘illegal’ DEIA, as understood by this Administration, the future of Plaintiffs’ fiscal viability and programming are subject to the unfettered discretion of an Administration that has made clear its predisposition against any speech or action that advances equal opportunity for historically marginalized groups, including people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and/or people with disabilities.” DEI being a target has been a broadband strategy of the Republican Party, and signals a cultural switch from conversations about systemic racism that spiked in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. In the past few months, several corporations—including Target and Walmart—have announced rollbacks to their DEI initiatives in the workplace. Meanwhile, in early February, the Attorney General in Missouri sued Starbucks claiming "systemic discrimination" as its workplaces have "become more female and less white." Lamda Legal previously sued the Trump Administration over the September 2020 Executive Order titled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” The organization challenged how the Executive Order “prohibits federal contractors and grantees from conducting workplace diversity trainings or engaging in grant-funded work that explicitly acknowledges and confronts the existence of structural racism and sexism in our society.” The court ruled in the plaintiffs favor, enjoining the Executive Order.

President Donald Trump’s Gallup Poll approval rating dipped slightly after the initial disruptive weeks of his presidency that have seen mass firings of federal workers, sudden freezes on federal spending, and new tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China. Gallup, which has tracked the opening approval ratings for American Presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower, found Trump’s approval rating dipped slightly from 47% in late January to 45% in mid-February. That is 15 points lower than the historical average of all other elected Presidents at this point in their first terms since 1953, according to Gallup’s polling. The poll found a majority of Americans don’t like how Trump is handling the economy, with 54% disapproving, and foreign trade, with 53% who disapprove. (The Gallup poll is based on telephone interviews with 1,004 adults during the two week period ending Feb. 16, and its margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.) Despite his historically low support among Americans more broadly, Republican voters remain strongly behind Trump. His job approval among Republicans is 93%, while his approval among Democrats is 4%. Among independent voters, Trump has 37% approval. During a taped interview that aired Tuesday night, Trump acknowledged that prices are going up on his watch. “Inflation is back,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity during a friendly interview alongside Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the person Trump has put in charge of slashing federal jobs. But Trump blamed President Biden’s policies for the increase. “I had nothing to do with it. These people have run the country. They spent money like nobody has ever spent,” he said. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that inflation has ticked up slightly at the beginning of the year, driven by rising costs for car insurance, used cars, health care, Internet and phone bills and airline tickets. U.S. prices rose 3% in the 12 months ending January, compared with a 2.9% rise over the 12 months ending in December. Fuel import prices alone rose 3.2% in January, the largest one month increase since April.

If you’re like every other earthling, you may want to keep your head down on Dec. 22, 2032. That’s the day an asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4 may strike our planet. Cosmic bookmakers don’t make an impact terribly likely—but the risk is on the rise. According to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) the likelihood of a collision was originally just 1.2%, per a calculation made in late January. However, on the week of Feb. 10, that number jumped to 2.3%, as 2024 YR4’s trajectory was more closely tracked. But on Feb. 18, the CNEOS raised the risk further, to 3.1%. That breaks the record previously held by the asteroid Apophis, an 1,100-ft. object discovered in 2004 that was at first given a 2.7% probability of colliding with us—before further observations lowered that probability to near zero any time within the next century. Now 2024 YR4 takes the crown. The object’s original 1.2% risk estimate pushed it past the 1% threshold that requires reporting the danger to multiple planetary defense authorities, including the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, the United Nations’ Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, and the U.N.’s Office for Outer Space Affairs. Despite that red alert, the space rock does not remotely pose an existential threat to life on Earth even if it does collide with us. It measures 130 to 300 feet across, a pebble compared to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which is estimated to have been six to nine miles in length. On the other hand, on Feb. 15, 2013, an object that measured just 65 feet across exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging 7,200 buildings and injuring 1,500 people. At up to five times the size of the Chelyabinsk object, 2024 YR4 has the potential to do a lot more than five times the damage. According to volcanologist and science journalist Robin George Andrews, every time an asteroid’s radius doubles, it increases its kinetic wallop eight-fold. Astronomers rank the danger an asteroid poses on something known as the Torino Scale, a zero to 10 hazard index that starts with rocks that pose no risk to us at all and runs to those that are “capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.” The asteroid making so much news today ranks as a three, representing “a chance of collision capable of localized destruction.” So should you worry? Almost certainly not. For all of the talk about fraying global alliances and the challenge governments have handling crises competently and well, protecting the Earth from incoming ordnance is one area in which political leaders, scientific minds, and public policy makers have their act together. A global web of space agencies, private observatories, and both Earth- and space-based telescopes are keeping a constant watch on the skies, tracking thousands of asteroids that pose even a minimal risk to Earth. What’s more, in the event a space rock does represent a threat, a NASA spacecraft proved in 2022 that the basic technology exists to intercept and deflect it before it comes anywhere near us. It’s only recently that we became aware of 2024 YR4 at all. The rock was discovered on Dec. 27, 2024, by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Chile. The size, trajectory, and speed of the asteroid immediately made it a cause of concern. Not only is it bigger than the Chelyabinsk object and potentially headed for Earth, it is also moving fast—about 38,000 mph, according to NASA’s calculations, or more than twice the velocity of an Earth-orbiting satellite. It’s that screaming speed that causes even a relatively small asteroid to pack such destructive force, since the faster an object moves the more energy it carries—energy that is dissipated when it collides with something like a planet. The location of 2024 YR4 qualifies it not just as any asteroid, but a near-Earth object (NEO). NEOs are defined as asteroids that hug the inner solar system, where we live, coming within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun. A single astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to the Earth, or 93 million miles. Once 2024 YR4’s NEO status was established, ATLAS astronomers acted fast, alerting not only the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.N., but the ESA, the CNEOS, and perhaps most important, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a consortium of no fewer than 59 governments, national space programs, and observatories that keep their eyes on the skies, cataloguing and tracking the flight paths of hundreds of thousands of asteroids, with special attention paid to the NEOs. Currently NASA, the IAWN, and other sky-watchers are monitoring about 38,000 NEOs, continually tracking their trajectories to determine if any changes in their flight paths warrant moving them either up or down the Torino Scale. At the moment, 2024 YR4 is close enough to Earth to be easily visible to telescopes. That will change, however, in April, when its flight path carries it around the sun, making it impossible to see until June of 2028. NASA is taking advantage of the time it has left before 2024 YR4 vanishes, reserving observation time on the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful off-Earth observatory ever built—to further investigate the rock’s size, mass, and flight path. Not only can all of these observations help predict when and if an asteroid will strike Earth, it can also provide at least a general range of what the impact point on the planet would be. With roughly 70% of Earth’s surface covered by ocean, that by itself means only a 30% chance a population center will be struck. For now, NASA astronomers have sketched out a very general 2024 YR4 impact risk corridor running from the eastern Pacific Ocean to northern South America, the Atlantic coast of Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia. That’s an awful lot of earthly real estate, but when the asteroid becomes visible again and draws closer to us, a much more precise ground-zero could be determined. The question, of course, is what do we do if calculations determine that we are in the cosmic cross hairs? With months—even years—to prepare, evacuation of endangered population centers is always possible. In January of 2021, the then-outgoing Trump Administration published a study of NEO emergency protocols, which reached the conclusion, shared by astronomers, that “mitigation measures that can be taken on Earth to protect lives and property include evacuation of the impact area and movement of critical infrastructure.” Sheltering in place is also an option, depending on the size of the asteroid and its anticipated destructiveness. A 2024 study in Acta Astronautica concluded that, at least outside of the bullseye of the impact zone, “seeking shelter in the basement of a reinforced concrete building or storm shelter, or in a home-built shelter in the basement of a house would suffice as alternatives to evacuation.” The authors of the paper saw hurricane preparedness measures as a good model for asteroid preparedness. But humanity does not have to be a passive target. In 2022, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, whose sole goal was to fly 7 million miles to the 525-foot asteroid Dimorphos, and crash into it at 14,000 miles per hour. Dimorphos is a moonlet of the larger 2,560-ft asteroid Didymos, making one revolution around its parent rock every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The purpose of the mission was to see if the impact could change the speed and direction of Dimorphos—a proof-of-principle exercise to determine if the same kind of planned collision could deflect an incoming asteroid. The mission succeeded wildly, accelerating Dimorphos’s orbit by 32 minutes, tripling NASA’s most optimistic projections. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” said then-NASA Administrator Bill Nelson when the results were released. “NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet.” Building a fleet of asteroid-deflecting spacecraft takes time and money, of course, and one mission to one harmless moonlet is a long way from deploying a global, Iron Dome-style anti-asteroid system. Until that hardware is in place, humanity is doing the next best thing, joining hands to scan the skies and sound a timely alert should our collective welfare ever be threatened.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration moved to end New York’s congestion pricing on Wednesday, just one month after the program had been rolled out. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy delivered the news in a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, rescinding the approval of the program. The decision rolled back a previous agreement between Hochul and the agency for the Value Pricing Pilot Program (VPPP) that charged drivers tolls for coming into Manhattan. "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House posted on X on Wednesday accompanied by an image of Trump wearing a crown on a fake TIME-inspired magazine cover. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) called the program “unprecedented” in scope and cited the lack of a toll-free option for drivers as the reason for its impending termination. Duffy also said that since the toll rate was chosen to increase revenue for transportation as opposed to reducing congestion, the “pilot runs contrary to the purpose of the VPPP.” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy thanked President Trump and Secretary Duffy in a statement Wednesday, but Gov. Hochul indicated that legal action against the President is already in motion. “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she said on X in response. When did NYC congestion pricing start? The VPPP was first approved by lawmakers in 2019, but proponents had to wait for a federal environmental review. The program was later approved by the Biden Administration last year, on Nov. 21, but congestion pricing did not officially begin until Jan. 5. The initial summer rollout of the program was paused in June due to concerns about the toll’s impact on the local economy. A revised version of congestion pricing lowered the toll from $15 to $9. How is NYC congestion pricing funded? Under congestion prices, drivers are charged $9 when they enter Manhattan’s Congestion Relief Zone, which falls below 60th Street, between 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. That means that drivers traveling through the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro bridges, and the Holland, Hugh L. Carey, and Queens Midtown tunnels, will have to pay the higher toll price. The Federal Highway Administration said Wednesday that it would work with the leaders behind the project to oversee an “orderly termination of the tolls,” though the timeline for that is unclear. How has Hochul responded? In response, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday to keep the program in place. “It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review—and barely three months after giving final approval to the Congestion Relief Program—USDOT would seek to totally reverse course,” said MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber in a statement on X. Hochul said the first-in-the nation program has already benefitted the city’s transportation system, pointing to faster commute times, greater “foot traffic” to local businesses, and an increase in yellow cab trips. Public transportation ridership has also increased, Hochul said in a statement on X. “Congestion pricing is a meticulously studied, globally-proven program that is enshrined in New York State law,” said Julie Tighe, President of the NY League of Conservation Voters. “We need the federal government to be a partner in solving congestion pricing, not a roadblock. New Yorkers deserve relief from traffic, better transit, and cleaner air—we will keep fighting for it every day.” Can Trump stop congestion pricing? Congestion pricing has been subject to lawsuits before by neighboring New Jersey, which sought to stop the program because it placed an unfair burden on its residents. Murphy wrote to Trump—who had promised to end congestion pricing on the campaign trail—on his first day in office, asking the President to give congestion pricing the “close look it deserved.” But others have expressed skepticism at whether the President can actually stop congestion pricing. Congressman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, criticized the Department of Transportation, arguing that the agency bears no authority to pause the program. “The Value Pricing Program is solidly established under federal law, and its approval cannot be arbitrarily revoked, especially when it is clearly delivering tangible benefits,” Nadler said on X on Wednesday. “Mr. President, we’ll see you in court.” The MTA called the Administration’s decision to terminate the program unlawful, arguing that the Trump Administration took action without an environmental review on the effects of pausing VPPP. “If FHWA had the right to unilaterally terminate a VPPP program that had already been approved and implemented, it would create uncertainty around the future of such programs any time leadership at FHWA, USDOT, or the White House changed—uncertainty that may make it difficult to issue bonds for other projects and would clearly undermine the purposes of the VPPP,” the legal complaint says.

Cate Hall’s sex drive tanked when she hit 40. After months of trying—and failing—to boost it, she read a pamphlet in a doctor’s office about the effects of low testosterone in women, including low libido, lack of energy, loss of strength and muscle tone, and cognitive difficulties, like trouble concentrating. “I just had sort of an ‘aha’ moment,” says Hall, a 41-year-old in Berkeley, Calif. “It clicked that that might be what was going on, because there was such a good match between the things I was experiencing and the symptoms of low testosterone.” Hall scheduled an appointment with a specialist, and in 2024 started testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)—receiving regular small doses of the hormone that’s almost synonymous with male health. Within about a week, she started noticing improvements across most aspects of her life. “The cognitive effects were very dramatic,” she says; it quickly resolved her brain fog and memory problems. “I feel sharper now mentally than I did 10 years ago.” She has less anxiety and more confidence, gets at least eight hours of sleep a night (compared to six pre-testosterone), and has welcomed back the energy she needs to exercise regularly. She’s also lost 6% of her body fat since starting TRT—and her libido improved. “I honestly think it has been, by far, the biggest quality-of-life improvement I've ever made for myself,” she says. Hall’s story isn’t unique: Cisgender women across the internet are touting the anecdotal benefits of testosterone therapy, and some experts say those stories match what they’re hearing in their offices. Many describe being asked about TRT multiple times a day. “There’s been increasing attention to it,” says Dr. Kathleen Jordan, chief medical officer of Midi Health, a virtual care clinic focused on navigating perimenopause and menopause. “We call it the ‘book club effect’—women who have tremendous outcomes share it with their friends, and then we see friends of our patients coming in to inquire about similar solutions.” But can testosterone therapy for women really lead to such profound health improvements? We asked experts to explain its potential benefits—and limitations. What exactly is testosterone therapy? Contrary to popular perception, testosterone isn’t simply a male hormone. While women have smaller amounts than men, testosterone plays an important role in regulating the menstrual cycle, maintaining bone density and muscle mass, and enhancing cognitive health, mood, sexual function, and energy. “After 30, our testosterone levels decrease,” Jordan says. “And by the time we're in midlife, in the premenopause and menopausal phase, they’re down to about 25% of what they were when we were younger.” Enter testosterone replacement therapy. More than 30 different testosterone products are approved for men by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the agency has never approved testosterone for women. However, doctors can still prescribe it off-label to women they feel would benefit. Historically, testosterone was used in combination with estrogen and progesterone, hormones that decline with age. But these days, it’s also prescribed as a standalone treatment, says Dr. Traci A. Kurtzer, a gynecologist at the Northwestern Medicine Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause, opening the door to people who can’t or don’t want to take other hormones for various reasons.

Along the sparkling coast of Southern California, a string of landslides creeping toward the sea has transformed the wealthy community of Rancho Palos Verdes into a disaster zone. New data from a NASA plane shows the widening threat of these slow-moving landslides, which have destabilized homes, businesses, and infrastructure like roads and utilities. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory documented how the landslides have pushed westward, almost doubling in area since the state mapped them in 2007. The landslides have also sped up in recent years. A month of aerial radar images taken by NASA in the fall revealed how land in the Palos Verdes Peninsula slid toward the ocean by as much as four inches each week between mid-September and mid-October. Before that, a city report showed more than a foot of weekly movement in July and August.The mass of slides in Los Angeles County, known as the Greater Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex, reactivated in 1956 after road construction destabilized the once-dormant slope. For decades, it slid just a few inches every year. But heavy rain in 2023 and early 2024 accelerated that movement, leading Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency, citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property.” Homes in Rancho Palos Verdes began collapsing in June and August of 2023. Streets have fissured. Walls have shifted and floors have cracked open to reveal the dynamic earth below. A downed power line related to the slides started a small brush fire in August. A $42 million buyout program helps property owners voluntarily sell and relocate, but homeowner insurance policies do not typically cover landslides. Mitigating such a disaster is extremely expensive. By the end of this fiscal year, the city said it will have spent more than $35 million, almost 90 percent of its general fund operations budget, on addressing the landslide. That includes the installation of 11 wells that have worked to pump out 145 million gallons of groundwater that could further destabilize the slope. The investment has yielded results: The landslide slowed by about 3 percent on average between December and February thanks to the wells and a lack of rain, the city said. Slow-moving slides are common around the world, and especially in California, where several hundred have been mapped in coastal mountain ranges. Normally moving at a sluggish pace, these slides can grind nearly to a halt during the dry summer months before a wet winter makes them crawl again. But last summer, the landslide complex in Rancho Palos Verdes exhibited strange behavior when it failed to slow. The best guess for why has to do with a very wet 2023, said Alexander Handwerger, a research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has studied the behavior of slow-moving landslides for well over a decade. Typically triggered tens of meters underground, they remain an ongoing area of research. “Of all the things we know,” Dr. Handwerger said, “we know the least about what’s happening under the ground.” Last week, other parts of Los Angeles County faced additional landslides, ones that move quickly, running at meters per second instead of centimeters per week. The National Weather Service in Los Angeles issued warnings for post-fire debris flows — a tangle of mud, rocks and trees that start on burn scars — ahead of heavy rainfall on Thursday. Los Angeles neighborhoods scorched by wildfires like the Eaton and Palisades fires last month faced some of the greatest dangers as those flows hit business and homes in Southern California. But slower-moving landslides, like the ones in Rancho Palos Verdes, are more predictable. They ooze rather than race. They typically need a season of rain, rather than a single storm, to accelerate. And it’s extremely rare for them to suddenly collapse or slide in a catastrophic way. It’s unclear what triggers that kind of sudden catastrophe, said Luke McGuire, an associate professor in geomorphology at the University of Arizona. He pointed to one of the few known examples of such an event, in 2017, when the Mud Creek Landslide in Big Sur gave way after eight years of stable sliding. More than 65 feet of rocks and dirt covered a quarter-mile of Highway 1, the scenic drive winding along the California coast. Experts say that the city of Rancho Palos Verdes probably will not experience that kind of sudden event. “You can never say never, but the likelihood that this would go into a catastrophic movement phase is quite low,” said Dave Petley, a landslide expert who collects global landslide data for the American Geophysical Union. “It’s likely it’ll continue to cause substantial property damage, but the risk of the thing suddenly sliding into the sea and taking everyone with it is not particularly high.” A 2019 Nature study by Dr. Handwerger showed that the Mud Creek Landslide could have been triggered by a shift from drought to record rainfall. In a warming world, an increase in extreme rain events could cause more landslides to quicken, according to the study. More precipitation could also cause more landslides to emerge from hibernation into slow-moving slides. “Rainfall under climate change can wake a landslide back up,” Dr. Petley said, adding that a vast number of dormant landslides with this potential exist across the globe.